This should be a really simple thing, but I can't do it

[Jon Chambers]

Every time I google this, I must be using the wrong terminology, because I can't find the answers, so I will explain this in long form here:

I'm working on a project with a team member that's using Audacity, but I'm using Audition. He's doing the foley, while I'm doing dialogue and music.

To make life easier for me, he works in multiple tracks so that two sound effects aren't ever fused together. That way, I can move them separately, adjust the volume separately, and so on. However, to get this many tracks, there is a lot of complete silence in between. When I say "silence", I don't mean "microphone is recording but nothing is happening" silence (as my google searching seems to keep defining the word) but total zeros in the wav form silence. No sound at all. (Please, someone tell me the correct professional term for that. Complete silence? Utter silence? Absolute silence? Air break? Dead air? Silence that is actually silent? Negative infinity decibels? No idea.)

So, what I should do, now that I've dragged and dropped the foley tracks into place, is get the blade tool and mark every point where the silence starts or stops. Then, manually click and delete every silent clip, so that the only clips which remain are clips with noise in them. From there I can adjust the timing, volume, and other properties of each individual clip without adjusting the track as a whole. I can also glance at a section of silence and know with absolute certainty that there is no sound in that section, because instead of being in a bright purple rectangle, it's the dark grey of there being absolutely no clip in the multitrack editor at all.

Doing this manually would take forever, and I might delete an actual sound by accident because I didn't zoom in far enough to see the subtle wave form.

What is the automated way of doing this?

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

Q4T  wrote

So, what I should do, now that I've dragged and dropped the foley tracks into place, is get the blade tool and mark every point where the silence starts or stops. Then, manually click and delete every silent clip, so that the only clips which remain are clips with noise in them.

It's digital silence, and you can't delete it as there's nothing to delete! You can only delete real clips - the ones you inserted yourself. The rest of the space is simply that - digital silence, because nothing is playing. If you want background sound of any description at all, you have to add it yourself.

[Jon Chambers]

You misunderstand.

In all the places where there is digital silence, in the multi track editor, I want there to be no clip there.

So, imagine I've got a clip that goes, "Bang! Ting! Boom!" I want Three clips. One that goes "Bang!" one that goes "Ting!" and one that goes "Boom!" If I hit play, it will still sound no different, but now I can drag "Ting!" back and forth without "Bang!" and "Boom!" moving with it.

Yes, I could manually put two cuts between "Bang!" and "Ting!", and another two cuts between "Ting!" and "Boom!", remember this is the multitrack editor, I click between each pair of cuts so that I now have three very short clips instead of one very long one.

[ryclark]

Surely that is down to the person providing the Foley effects. He should supply them as separate audio files for each effect. So somehow you have to split a long audio file into individual clips. As is usual in Audition there are many ways of doing this. For instance in the Multitrack view you could place the total audio clip into the session and split them up as you have outlined. Or you could place three copies of the original audio into the session and drag the ends of each one to just include the section that you want.

Alternatively you can open the long files into the Waveform view, mark out the regions that you want to keep and export all as separate audio files to use in the Multitrack session.

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

Q4T  wrote

You misunderstand.

In all the places where there is digital silence, in the multi track editor, I want there to be no clip there.

It's not me that's misunderstanding, it's you, I think...

BY DEFINITION, where there is no clip, there is digital silence on a track!

As ryclark says, there are loads of ways to achieve this. In addition to what he's suggested, you should realise that there is effectively no limit to the number of times you can use a clip, either on one track or indeed any number of them. So all you need to do is import the clip you want, where you want it, and drag the ends of it in so that it only plays the part you want. And you can do this as many times as you want - no splicing or cutting necessary at all.

[SuiteSpot]

You can also highlight a section of the clip (the 'boom' bit for example) and press the Alt key while dragging (assuming the clip isn't 'locked') and you can drag that as a copy to another location - you can do that as many times as you want

[Jon Chambers]

Okay, I'll try to explain it with pictures this time. See the two clips on the bottom? See the clips above?

I want the two clips on the bottom to be separated out into individual clips like the clips on the top, but I want it done automatically, because doing it manually would take forever.

[Jon Chambers]

When anyone here finally understands the question, could you please tell me how to word it? I need to learn the professional words here so I can be understood.

[ryclark]

So if we understand it correctly these tracks are actually already synced to picture and the effects within them are foley effects are in the correct positions to sync? But visually you would like to split the single file into individual clips? Normally video post production would just accept these files complete with digital silence as they are as you don't want to mess with the sync.

So how many separate audio cues are there in one of your typical Foley files? One way to help you see where the audio in the clips is is to add Markers. Once added they can be named. Then you can easily find them from the Markers List and click on the names in the list to jump to them.

[Jon Chambers]

Well, I'm just starting, so there is no established "typical" yet. Though I always try to learn the techniques for one scale above the current project so they'll still be relevant as my projects get bigger.

The point is, I do want to mess with the sync, but I want to knowingly mess with it. As in, I might be listening and think "that sound came in too early. Let's delay it slightly" or "this one was too loud, let's turn it down". Stuff like that.

Last time I tried this, if I wanted to move a sound, I had to get the razor tool, make a cut before, make a cut after, drag it until it was cross fading. It was really tedious, especially if I made the cut too close to the sound, and the digital silence cross fading into digital silence must be a waste of hardware resources.

If I wanted to change the volume, again, razor tool, look for the silence, cut, cut, adjust the clip volume. The whole time thinking, "There MUST be a faster way of doing this."

I am unfamiliar with markers. Would using them be faster than what I'm already doing? I'll learn any trick to shave off an extra second.

[Jon Chambers]

It is true, there that no clip means digital silence, but it's not true that digital silence means no clip. I can have a clip of digital silence. I can have a clip with digital silence between a pair of noises.

Yes, I could have separate clips exported, but then I wouldn't know where to put them at all. They have been carefully positioned within the wav file, and I only want to tweak them, not put the entire jigsaw puzzle together from scratch.

The main reason for this is I want a visual cue to let me know where the silence is when I've got all 40 minutes on screen at once. This will be a big time saver, if I can skip all the scenes that don't have any sound effects at all. As it currently stands, I need to zoom right in and look at the wave form to see if it's flat or not.

Sorry guys, this is a very difficult one to explain, though the most important thing here is I am talking about the multitrack editor. If I were talking about the wav form editor, the question itself wouldn't make any sense, because "No clip" isn't even a thing in the wav form editor. Everything in the wav form editor is "clip"

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

Q4T  wrote

Sorry guys, this is a very difficult one to explain, though the most important thing here is I am talking about the multitrack editor. If I were talking about the wav form editor, the question itself wouldn't make any sense, because "No clip" isn't even a thing in the wav form editor. Everything in the wav form editor is "clip"

Er, not that's not true. Everything in the waveform editor represents a tangible file, not a clip. A clip is a time selection from within a file, and this distinction is important; you'll get nowhere otherwise. So technically, clips in this form represent no more than a concept - there's nothing 'real' about them in the slightest; they are merely two time-code marks relating to points within a file. Yes, this means that if you have clips in a multi-track session and you replace the master file you got them from with another file, then those clips would have completely different material in them. People actually make use of this quite often; it can be rather useful.

I suspect that what you need to do initially is go to Edit>Preferences>Multi-track clips and make sure that there's a check in the entry that says 'Use embedded timecode when inserting clips into multitrack'. What you can do then, with the file open in Waveform view is to make the selection you want (don't even need to use markers) and assuming that the start of the file and your session time starts at the same point (0:00.000), when you right-click on it and select 'Insert into Multi-track (name of your session), the selection you made will be inserted on the timeline as a separate clip, and it should be inserted in the correct place. If for any reason it isn't, then go to the Metadata for your original file, and in the BWF section, reset the time reference to zero.

The end result should be separate clips, extracted from your file, in the correct place on the timeline.

[Jon Chambers]

I guess that could be, SLIGHTLY faster, but isn't there a way to select all the sounds automatically? If I can have everything that isn't silence selected, I could do as you say and that would save a LOT of time. But how do I get the sounds selected without selecting the silence is the real question.

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

You need Diagnostics. You should be able to work all of it out from this screen-grab:

[Jon Chambers]

Sorry about the delay. I won't bore you with why the project was on hold for so long.

Okay, so got the markers figured out. I like markers. Markers are good. I've got all the bits I want marked.

I also checked my preferences, just as you said.

Still, when I inset all the marked clips into the multi track, they insert by the playhead, where ever the playhead happens to be at the time. If I select them all and insert in one batch, the first one appears exactly at the playhead, the second appears exactly at the end of the first, and so on. What am I doing wrong?

[Jon Chambers]

I did check all the things you told me to check.

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

You can alter placement behaviour in Edit>Preferences>Multitrack clips so that clips are placed onto successive tracks.

[Jon Chambers]

I want them on the same track, but I want them placed with the same gaps that existed in the original. Or put another way, the "Use embedded timecode when inserting clips into Multitrack" doesn't seem to do anything. I expected it to keep the timing of the original file, but it doesn't.

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

This doesn't work quite the way you might think it does. There's a full explanation in this thread: Embedded timecode

[Jon Chambers]

Okay, below is the original file. Above is the output at the end of the process. If I had done it correctly, all clips should be in exactly the same position. However, all clips have moved left, or earlier. Is there a way of doing all of that, such that the clips appear in the same place as the original file?

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

Q4T  wrote

If I had done it correctly, all clips should be in exactly the same position. However, all clips have moved left, or earlier. Is there a way of doing all of that, such that the clips appear in the same place as the original file?

If you read carefully through the embedded timecode link above, you'd discover why this is. If you want it in a nutshell, it's because there's no 'embedded time' on a file. The only time reference is the start time, and if you cut up the file, then any references you had to times relative to this would be destroyed. File time is only measured from the initial time reference; there are no absolute markers in it at all.

[ryclark]

So we are now back to where you started this thread. Although you say 'Doing this manually would take forever' once you get into it it doesn't really take that long, especially if you are doing it a lot and work out what shortcuts you can use. In many ways it would be a lot quicker than all the time you have spent on this thread in my experience.

So I, perhaps, feel a feature request coming on for an option to allow the Start time of marked Regions to be embedded into the metadata when Exporting marked regions to separate files on when inserting them into a Multitrack session.

[Jon Chambers]

I want to mark that as "correct answer", but I'm still holding out hope that it might not be. On the plus side, I learned about markers. They were cool, but just don't do anything I want them to do.

[Jon Chambers]

I also wish someone much more intelligent than me could put this in as a feature request. It seems that every time I try to describe what I want done, someone gives me instructions to perform a completely different task. I can't imagine what the feature request people would make of my confused ramblings.

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

ryclark  wrote

So I, perhaps, feel a feature request coming on for an option to allow the Start time of marked Regions to be embedded into the metadata when Exporting marked regions to separate files on when inserting them into a Multitrack session.

The snag here is that it couldn't be metadata as such, as that only exists for files. It would have to be an internal reference to the position of that clip in the original file, and be a 'one-time-only' marker export. This would be to take account of what would happen if you edited the file in Waveform view whilst clips from it were open in a multitrack session. If you do that now, you get a warning that the file has altered, and so may your session, as individual clip timing at present uses the time counted from the start of the original file to the point you want to insert. Altering the length of the file alters these points, obviously. Bit of a snag, as then each clip contains something different!

So to accommodate this, you'd have to overwrite existing clip handling, and that might not be so easy...