Trimming and deleting without changing length on a multitrack file

Report · Sep 22, 2019

Hi all!
I'm editing a multitrack audio file for my podcast and it is getting unviable as I have to trim out every silence to have a more dinamic interaction between all guests.

I can not use the Diagnostics > Delete Silence function because it does not keep the lenght of the file, and it also does not break, it gives me a long and unpaused track.

Is there any feature that cuts off the silence automatically leaving the tracks like this?

The empty spaces were silences like this:

I have also tried to use Diagnostcs > Mark Audio but if I can not delete what is between markers (or at least cut the track in all markers) this function is also not useful for what I need.

Does anyone has a cool tip for me? I really appreciate because my files are 2h long and it is taking 10X that to edit...
Please help!! 😃
Mari

Report · Sep 23, 2019

No, I'm afraid that there really aren't any shortcuts to getting speech to sound coherent. The only thing you can do is practice, really. All speech is different, and you'd need the software to understand the relevance of what it was doing - which of course it simply can't do.

The usual way to do this is to mix everything down to a single file, and just edit that so that it's coherent. It's a podcast - as long as people can get the meaning out of it without switching off, that's fine - you don't have to go to obsessive lengths to get it perfect, and once you've got into the swing of it, this sort of de-umming and de-erring (the trade term for what you're doing) becomes second nature and much quicker.

Report · Sep 23, 2019

Hi Steve,
Actually I don't want Audition to change anything on the speech, I'm sorry if I did not explain correctly.
I just wanted it to cut in the beginning and at the end of each non silent area automatically without changing the lenght of the track (keeping spaces where was silnce before, like the image I posted).
I will be the one giving the dynamic to the conversation, but the work of cutting before and after each non silent area takes an huge amount of time.
Regards,
Marina

Report · Jan 18, 2022

Just want to say I would also LOVE a feature that worked like delete silence but instead just muted those sections and otherwise maintained the length of the track, especially if it had a nice bit of fade into each silenced portion to prevent those annoying clipping sounds when a track suddenly drops off completely. I am also using Audition mostly to edit podcasts and sometimes, even with headphones on all the speakers involved in our recording, we get a little bleed during listening sections. Especially after adding broadcast compression. If the guests are in the same room this isn't usually an issue however since the pandemic our guests are almost exclusively remote interviews so the minor bleed can create a pretty anoying echo from the delays inherent to remote recording. Just wanted to add this comment in the hopes that a two year old thread might get noticed by someone at Adobe and something like this could be included in the next update of Audition.

Report · Sep 25, 2019

This is an interesting one and I can see each painful edit there in your example!

As Steve mentions there isn't really an automated way to do this in multitrack. What you could also consider is inserting noise gates on all the tracks and setting the threshold so that the track is silent when speech is not heard (above a certain dB level). This is the next best thing and you then wouldn't need to make the cuts as Adobe Audition would automatically mute tracks when there is no speech.