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

[Richard Bates 0]

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

[scook 2,728]

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

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.

[John Vere 598]

+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. 

[Jeremy Oakes 32]

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

[John Vere 598]

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. 

[scook 2,728]

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.

[user390096 14]

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.

[lapasoa 86]

I think what Scook said by using Ripple Edit is the fast and simpler way.

[Kalle Rantaaho 29]

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?

[57Gregy 276]

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.

[scook 2,728]

That's right, it is often called a time-based selection. The second method mentioned in my post.

 

Some prefer to bounce the entire project to a track in the original project before performing the export.