Week3

In addition to playing and recording a sound, we can also edit the sound more to our liking. The first thing to understand is how a selection works. A sound can be selected in a number of ways. The easiest way is CTRL+A to select the entire file. Obviously we don't always want to do that and we want to only select parts of the file. This is done by using the start and finish marker. The start marker starts the beginning of a selection, and the finish marker is the end of the selection. You drop the start marker by pressing the left bracket key at the place where you want the selection to start. You drop the finish marker by pressing the right bracket key at the place where you want the selection to end.

trimming a selection

One of the simplest forms of editing the audio file is to trim everything outside of the selection. This essentially means that everything that is left outside of the start and finish markers will get deleted. This could especially be useful if there is an ad or something at the beginning or end of a file that you want to get rid of. You perform a trim by pressing CTRL+T.

Making finer edits

What if you want to edit more finer points in your audio, or you are editing bits and pieces. The first thing you have to understand is that you can make finer edits with the markers and simply pressing delete to get rid of the audio in question. How tight or fine you want the edit to be depends on the zoom level you set when editing. You can change the zoom level by pressing shift and the number keys 1 through 0 to get different zoom ratio. I usually use 1 second zoom or 10 second zoom personally, but feel free to experiment with these.

Once your zoom level is set you then place your start and finish markers down around the little bits you want to edit. You can either 0 in on those things by playing the track and rewinding it back till you hear the spot again and drop the markers, or pausing the playing audio and dropping the start and markers in an approximate spot where you want them to be. They will be moved to their exact location.

Next, we want to move the start and finish marker either a little bit back or a little bit forward depending on how far off you were. You move the start marker by pressing shift+left and right arrows and the finish marker by pressing CTRLShift+left and right arrows. Your zoom level is dependent on how much audio your marker moves across when you are modifying the selection. If you've configured your marker preview in the playback properties tab, you will hear both a bit of audio at the start and a bit of audio where the finish marker is. You can also play the unselected parts of the audio so you know what the selection will sound like before you delete it out of existence.

List of editing keystrokes

• Shift+Left, Shift+Right: Moves the start marker left or right (backward or forward).
• Ctrl+Shift+Left, Ctrl+Shift+Right: Moves the finish marker left or right.
• Ctrl+A: Selects the entire sound.
• Shift+Home: Moves the start marker to the beginning of the sound.
• Shift+End: Moves the start marker to the finish marker's position.
• Ctrl+Shift+Home: Moves the finish marker to the start marker's position.
• Ctrl+Shift+End: Moves the finish marker to the end of the sound.
• [ (left bracket): Moves the start marker to the playback marker.
• ] (right bracket): Moves the finish marker to the playback marker.