How Do You Consolidate Soundbites...

rainmaker · Post by **rainmaker** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 4:37 pm

I am trying to take an audio cd that is just voice (speech) and strip out all the silence to save all that time. The end goal is to mke the cd much shorter by getting rid of the silence and then speeding it up a little.

So I have the strip silence function working perfectly. I end up with about 300 seperate sounbites strewn across the Sequence Editor. The next step is where I'm having trouble...

The sounbites are spaced apart now with varying gaps in between. I am trying to get all these sounbites to butt up against their left-most sounbite, thus eliminating all the silence gaps. The only tool I can think of that does this in DP right now is the "Throw" feature. When you click on a soundbite and hold the "Control" key, while dragging in the direction you want to throw, it will then automatically slide over to the edge of the other soundbite.

The problem with this is, I would have to do this for each soundbite. Is there any way to select all the soundbites and have them all butt up against each other to the left of the Sequence Editor?

I'm trying to get this done with two commands... 1) Split Silence, 2) "Consolidate Sounbites", 3) Done!

Anyone know of a way to do this?

Thanks,
Rainmaker

timriley · Post by **timriley** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 5:31 pm

I think MERGE SOUNDBITES is what you're looking for! AUDIO MENU>MERGE SOUNDBITES... Page 550 in the manual....

Make sure all your audio edits are correct before merging..

------CORRECTION------

After reading your post again, i dont think merge audio is what you're after! You wanted to bunch the seperate audio files together first! Hmmmm not sure how you would do that all at once, but i'll get back to you if i work it out...

sdemott · Post by **sdemott** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 5:58 pm

I don't know if this will work, so save before trying but could you select all the soundbites and then "throw" them by nudging to the left to get them to abut one another.

In Pro Tools there is a mode that causes all the soundbites (regions in PT parlance) to automagically slide to eliminate space created by editing (including the "strip silence" command). It would be nice if DP could do the same.

wheever · Post by **wheever** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 8:48 pm

How about just speeding up the tempo? You could fine-tune it manually from there.

Just a thought.

DP Fan · Post by **DP Fan** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 8:53 pm

You can try this... It's not what you're looking for but may be faster (no clicking...all key commands).

Use the I-beam... Click anywhere on the track (puts the blinking "insertion point" on the track). Hitting return returns the insertion point to the top of the track. Tab has is scroll forward along the Soundbites. Alt-Tab has it scroll backward. Shift-Tab will do the same but select the time range.

So you could:

1) click anywhere with the i-beam
2) using Tab or Alt-Tab get the insertion point at the end of the first soundbite
3) Shift-Tab selects that time range
4) Comman-J deletes that time range
5) Repeat

This likely would not be faster but would add a little variety.

The other logical place I looked was Edit Menu > Search, which allows you to do specialized selections, but it seems that is designed to select "events" rather than eventless "time ranges"...

In short, after pondering it, I am unaware of a faster method than "the throw"

muzishun · Post by **muzishun** » Thu Jan 17, 2008 9:16 am

Hi. I tried this with a lead vocal and it worked... hope I explain it clearly.

After stripping silence, go to the soundbites window and set to view by "Original Time Stamp".

Create a new audio track. Open up an event list editor for that track. Select all the soundbites in the soundbite window (except the original unstripped, of course), and drag into the event list. Then use Merge Soundbites.

HTH

timriley · Post by **timriley** » Thu Jan 17, 2008 11:21 am

muzishun wrote:Hi. I tried this with a lead vocal and it worked... hope I explain it clearly.

After stripping silence, go to the soundbites window and set to view by "Original Time Stamp".

Create a new audio track. Open up an event list editor for that track. Select all the soundbites in the soundbite window (except the original unstripped, of course), and drag into the event list. Then use Merge Soundbites.

HTH

Hey HTH...

That's really great!! Works for me too....

I wouldn't have thought of that in a million years!!
I only tried it out on a blank project with just one audio file so it was fairly straight forward... It might get a bit confusing on a large project with lots of audio files that perhaps haven't been named properly.. Im also not sure i'll ever need to use this function.... But hey, very nifty!

Nice one!

rainmaker · Post by **rainmaker** » Thu Jan 17, 2008 8:29 pm

That's Awesome, thanks so much for that tip. As stated, I would have never thought of doing it that way. In fact, I don't really even know much about what the Event List is actually for. I need to break out the old manual and read into that one.

Once again proving why this forum is so indespensible...

Thanks Again,
Rainmaker

muzishun · Post by **muzishun** » Thu Jan 17, 2008 8:50 pm

Great! Glad it worked out for you.

rcannonp · Post by **rcannonp** » Thu Jan 17, 2008 9:03 pm

timriley wrote:... It might get a bit confusing on a large project with lots of audio files that perhaps haven't been named properly.. Im also not sure i'll ever need to use this function.... But hey, very nifty!

You have to be careful about your sorting because it will be reflected in the event list when you drop the files onto it. If you sort by name then audio.2 will come after audio.10. Original timestamp may be the best option, but it would get confusing if you have more than one source file.

Phil O · Post by **Phil O** » Fri Jan 18, 2008 9:12 am

I seem to remember that someone had a very cool way of doing that a while back. I looked for it but couldn't find it. Do some more searching and you might get lucky.

Phil

DP Fan · Post by **DP Fan** » Fri Jan 18, 2008 2:43 pm

muzishun wrote:Hi. I tried this with a lead vocal and it worked... hope I explain it clearly.

After stripping silence, go to the soundbites window and set to view by "Original Time Stamp".

Create a new audio track. Open up an event list editor for that track. Select all the soundbites in the soundbite window (except the original unstripped, of course), and drag into the event list. Then use Merge Soundbites.

HTH

Well how about that. I never would've thought of that either...

rainmaker · Post by **rainmaker** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 4:59 pm

OK, I'm not sure what happened or why this doesn't work today, but for whatever reason, the method Mike posted doesn't work anymore. I tried it the first day he suggested it and it worked like a charm. I have tried it several times since then, making sure I am doing it step by step as he suggested, and it keeps giving me the following wrong result.

After I strip the silence, I go to the sounbites window to view by "Original Time Stamp". It then sorts the entire list from the largest number down to the smallest??? The first time I tried this it started with the smallest. I can't figure out what happened, but the list is now sorted backwards. So obviously when I go drag the list into the event editor, the last sounbite plays first, and so on. (all 2001 of them)

Mike, any idea what I'm doing wrong? It doesn't make sense to me what happened???

Thanks,
Rainmaker

rainmaker · Post by **rainmaker** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 5:16 pm

I've done a little more researching and it appears that in order for a time stamp to be applied to the original track that I'm importing, I HAVE to import the track through the Sounbite Window mini menu "Import Audio". If I just drag a track from the desktop onto the Sequencer Editor window, no time stap gets written to the resulting soundbite. Interesting.

Why doesn't a time stamp get written to the audio file when dragging into the SE and it does when importing through the Sounbites window???

Anyways, all is well again and it does work as intended as long as that original time stamp gets attached to the original file before you strip silence.

Thanks,
Rainmaker

muzishun · Post by **muzishun** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 7:06 pm

Hey Rainmaker;

I don't work with timestamps very often, so I'm sorry I don't know why that's happening to you. But I believe I've read here that there are issues with timestamps when importing and exporting files.

You could set a User Timestamp (Audio menu) before stripping silence. Then sort the Soundbite list by User TimeStamp.
I think that would set it straight.

I hope I'm not confusing things.

But it seems like you've got it worked out.

edited for accuracy