Newbie seeking guidance on editing music!

[Moondust88]

Hello Adobe Community! I am looking to shorten some music tracks for an upcoming dance performance event, and rather than just fading songs out at the end I am looking to cut out repetitive sections of the songs. Does anyone have any advice for doing this in a way that makes it not obvious to our audience that the music has been edited? Any tips on clean transitions in a song when a chunk has been taken out? 

For context, most of my experience with the adobe suite has been for graphic design, but I am learning this program as a hobbyist and am by no means doing this professionally. I am also a dancer and often have to shorten songs to fit into performance time slots, so I am hoping to gain a better understanding on the best ways to do this.

[EuanWilliamson]

What you need to use is remix 

it will shorten or lengthen tracks as you need. 

[Pariah Burke · Accepted solution]

HI! Shortening your audio can be done either the Waveform editor (editing the single music directly) or in Multitrack mode, which means you'll then have to do a process called Mixdown to get a WAV or MP3 for use in other applications. 

The easist way to accomplish what you're asking for is to do the following in the Waveform editor:

1.  Make a copy of your music file so you have a path backward if you need the un-shortened version again.
2. Open your music directly in Adobe Audition, which will open it in the Waveform editor.
3. Use the Time Selection Tool (it's the I-beam in the Tools panel in Audition) to either select what want to keep or delete of the music, whichever is easier.
4. If you selected music to keep, choose Edit > Crop. Audition will delete everything except what you've selected.
   If you selected the parts to delete, press Delete on your keyboard.
5. Either way, you'll probably have an upbrupt start, stop, or both to the music. You'll probably want to fade one or both ends, which you can do easily with the help of this video on Adobe's Audition Help pages.

Let me know if you need any additional help, or if I didnt' completely understand your end goal with the music. I'm from the graphic design end of the business myself, but I also have a radio show and do voiceover, so I use Audition almost daily.

[Moondust88]

Thank you so much for your help! Do you have any advice for how to take a chunk out of the middle of a song without the transition sounding abrubt? Would you use a fade in that case as well, or is there a different way to do it? My concern is that I have removed a chunk from the middle (instead of the beginning and end) and I hope to make the transition to the next part sound smoother- would a fade work for a section in the middle of the song, and is there a certain type of fade I should look for?  

[Richard M Knight]

I've been editing music for 40+ years, if you would like to send me the music ( via dropbox or similar) I can cut it for you and send you the Aduition project so you can see what I have done. Let me know the length required. Re-mix works well for some pieces of music but often you can make the music 'flow' better by doing it manually.

[Pariah Burke · Accepted solution]

You're most welcome!

I would suggest taking @Richard M Knight up on their very generous offer. Richard or I could easily give you various techniques and best practices, but, without sounding pedantic, editing music is an art more than a science. How to remove this chunk and stitch the music together might be very different than doing the same with that chunk just a few seconds later. If you let Richard do it for this one piece of music, there's going to be a lot more you can learn from looking at the Audition .SESX file than you'd get from a list of dos and donts from us, I would think.

That said, please feel free to come back and ask us if you need more help or advice after seeing and hearing Richard's edits on your music.

A few basic tips for cutting, stitching, mixing music:

• In Audition, zoom in to where you can see the peaks and valleys of the wave form.
• Listen with headphones (or earbuds) while editing. You'll pickup notes and problems much more easily than if you're using speakers--even great speakers.
• Look and listen for the beat of the piece and remove/cut/stitch so that that beat is maintained. You don't want 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4.
• Select the area of music you think you want to cut out, then turn on Loop Playback and Skip Selection (the blue and green buttons in my screenshot below, respectively). Skip Selection will let you hear a few seconds before your selected area and then immediately a few seconds after, as if the selected part was already deleted. You can then adjust the selection as needed on either end until you hear a smooth transition between the part before and after the selection. Loop Playback just replays that section over and over again while you adjust so that you don't have to keep hitting the Spacebar or the Play button.
  
  When happy, click Delete (in Waveform editor) or Shift+Delete in Multitrack mode to delete and automatically bring the ends together (Ripple Delete). Keep in mind that you might not want a hard cut--it depends on the music--and may instead want to blend the ends together with a crossfade--in very simple terms, two sound pieces overlap and blend together, which can smooth out cuts.
• If at all possible, try to get stems of the music. Stems are the various tracks and instruments of the musical piece separated so that they're individually editable. This makes it much easier to cut segments without having, say, a saxophone replaced with a trumpet mid-note. Stems are often available from higher end music licensing services or individuals from whom you commission custom music, but usually aren't available if you're getting standard video- or presentation-style background music or beds from places like https://stock.adobe.com or similar libraries.