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How do I trim the leading silence from a track before exporting


Richard Bates

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I've got several seconds of blank space at the beginning of my song.  How do I trim all of that off all of my tracks (about 10) and still keep them synched for exporting.  Putting the playback head at the beginning of the music doesn't make any difference.  The leading silence is added when the track is exported.

Thanks in advance.

Richard

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could use ripple edit to remove the blank space from the project

or 

leave the space in the project and use a time-based selection for export then select "C" in the large export module (image below) or use the export dialog

ControlBar.03.2.png

or

export as is and finish up the file in a wave editor

 

I prefer to make the selection or clean up with a wave editor and leave the project as is.

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+1 to toping and tailing in a wave editor. This takes me all of a minute to prepare a wave file. I even leave fade outs to do there as I can get it perfect. 

Gold Wave is free to try.  Wave Lab is only $99. I gave up on trying to get Cakewalk to export a "perfect" wave file. Take to long and especially for a whole album. 

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31 minutes ago, John Vere said:

+1 to toping and tailing in a wave editor. This takes me all of a minute to prepare a wave file. I even leave fade outs to do there as I can get it perfect. 

Gold Wave is free to try.  Wave Lab is only $99. I gave up on trying to get Cakewalk to export a "perfect" wave file. Take to long and especially for a whole album. 

+ 1 for Goldwave. I always top and tail in that programme.

J

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http://www.goldwave.ca/goldwave.php  

Lifetime membership for only $70 Can. I bought it a long time ago it was $50. I was worried about the Lifetime being short lived but they are still going strong. It's a Canadian company as well so of course I'm patriotic about that. I use it for  MP3 batch conversion too. My wife uses it to record just the audio from some of her on line seminars. The user interface is dead simple to understand with those nice big cheerful icons.   

https://www.magix.com/ca/free-download/sound-forge-pro/   

I like Sound forge tools for cleaning up old recordings on cassette or vinyl. It come free with Sony turntables and I got the updated version when I bought Movie Studio. Sony used to own Vegas and SoundForge but it is now Magix. I think it's also around $70.

But Wave Lab has some features I also need that the others don't have. And it's workflow is faster. It's stupid crazy to learn and a lot of good features are hard to find. 

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16 minutes ago, John Vere said:

SoundForge but it is now Magix. I think it's also around $70.

SoundForge Pro occasionally (every year or so) goes on sale for as little as $20 as part of a deal on Humble Bundle.

The sales show up in the deals area of this forum.

Usually a release behind current but a great deal.

Much more than the basic version of SoundForge.

 

There are several free editors that easily handle the basics.

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If there are no tempo changes or envelopes,  just highlight all tracks and drag them left to the start, then export. If you like the exported file, simply close the project without saving and next time you open it, it will have that 10 second silence in the beginning. You could also just hit CTLR+Z once or twice to get your tracks back to where they were before you dragged them. Then save/close.

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Often the blank space in the beginning is left there to allow smooth MIDI playback start or for a similar reason. So one might want to leave it there for future sessions of the project.

If you simply select the desired portion of the project in the Time Ruler, then only that part gets exported - doesn't it? Or does my memory fail?

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4 hours ago, Kalle Rantaaho said:

If you simply select the desired portion of the project in the Time Ruler, then only that part gets exported - doesn't it? Or does my memory fail?

I tried it the other day, selected Ctrl>a to select all of the tracks, which selected the entire timeline. Then I just moved the green marker at measure 1 to the beginning of the audio and it just exported the song from there.

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  • 1 year later...

I use the arranger feature (new in ~May 2020) to add a section at the beginning that covers the blank part of the song I want to cut off.  Then I make a new arrangement without including that new, first blank section, and commit it to the project using the "Commit Arrangement to Project" button.  There are some potential gotchas with some VST's, but it may be worth a try.  Quite easy once you see it, but you do need to be using the Arranger and have the rest of the song either sectioned off in pieces or just captured as one giant section in order to use this trimming technique.  There are useful YouTube tutorials on how to use the Arranger.   I'd recommend reading the section in the Cakewalk Reference Guide starting around page 468 as it does include some comments about potential problems. https://bandlab.github.io/cakewalk/docs/Cakewalk Reference Guide.pdf   If you're unfamiliar with the Arranger feature, I'd also recommend a quick self demo of maybe a 4 track simple, new project to gain some confidence of how this works.   Remember the "Undo" feature is your friend, but I'm not completely sure it works in this situation (thankfully I have not needed it...  yet).

 

Screenshot 2022-02-20 at 11-46-24 Cakewalk by BandLab Reference Guide - Cakewalk Reference Guide pdf.png

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 1/19/2021 at 3:38 PM, John Vere said:

+1 to toping and tailing in a wave editor. This takes me all of a minute to prepare a wave file. I even leave fade outs to do there as I can get it perfect. 

Gold Wave is free to try.  Wave Lab is only $99. I gave up on trying to get Cakewalk to export a "perfect" wave file. Take to long and especially for a whole album. 

I've recently taken a liking to using envelopes and such on the master bus while staying in Cakewalk.  Took me awhile to discover how to display the busses in the horizontal track view which I guess is about the only place to use it that way.

One other general note on the question the OP had.  I think the main problem with finding solutions to what he asked is the "You don't know what you don't know"; specifically, the terminology used in the program.  Is it a cut, remove, delete, crop, edit, delete special, move, slide, nudge, etc. etc.  Makes it tough on the search algorithms to return the right answer(s) if the question isn't phrased correctly. 

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The problem with top and tails in Cakewalk using the export dialogue is you can’t preview it. That’s the deal breaker for me. Assembly of an album is different than one offs. I have very specific timing I want depending on the tempo of the music. 
 

A lot of the ideas posted above are just way too much work compared to what I do in way less time. That time adds up when dealing with 20 songs . And what @Kalle Rantaaho said about midi instruments is definitely important.  


Yes you can draw an envelope on the Master bus.  This is almost always needed for midi instruments because you don’t seem to be able to add a fade like you can on each audio track. But for me because I’ll be topping and tailing with the wave editor it’s much quicker to deal with it there.  
I also use Wave lab to check peak, RMS levels as well as it will look for digital errors. 

 

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24 minutes ago, John Vere said:

Assembly of an album is different than one offs. I have very specific timing I want depending on the tempo of the music. 

A lot of the ideas posted above are just way too much work compared to what I do in way less time.

Yes, but if you're not assembling an album, you can just select in the timeline and export as Kalle Rentaho suggested. The mistake the OP made was selecting all the tracks first which is not necessary. CW will export everything in the time range if nothing is selected. You can also set a punch or loop region and use the option in the export dialog to get the time range from that.

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