- Opening a file for editing
- Selecting a region for editing and changing its level
- Cutting, deleting, and pasting audio regions
- Cutting and pasting with multiple clipboards
- Extending and shortening musical selections
- Simultaneous mixing and pasting
- Repeating part of a waveform to create a loop
- Fading regions to reduce artifacts
Extending and shortening musical selections
Background music often needs to be lengthened or shortened to fit a video’s duration. In this lesson you’ll lengthen a piece of music by copying one verse and extending it to create two verses.
- Navigate to the Lesson03 folder, and open the file Ueberschall_PopCharts.wav. (“Pop Charts” is the name of a commercially available sound library from Ueberschall you can use to create your own royalty-free sound tracks and needledrop music.)
- Start playback. The verse starts at about 7.5 seconds and ends around 23.2 seconds where it changes key and goes into a bridge.
- You need to define the precise verse beginning and end, copy that, and then insert it at the end of the first verse. Place the playhead at the approximate beginning of the verse (around 7.5 seconds).
- Zoom in until you can see an obvious pulse at 7.74 seconds; this corresponds to the downbeat where the kick drum is prominent. Click at the beginning of the downbeat, and then press M to place a marker there.
- Zoom out and locate the end of the verse (around 23.2 seconds).
- Again, zoom in and place a marker at the beat that happens just after 23.2 seconds.
- Zoom out until you can see both markers. Choose Edit > Snapping; select Enabled and verify that Snap to Markers is currently enabled.
- Select the region between the two markers. Note that because you enabled snapping, the markers have a virtual “magnetic field” that “snaps” the region boundaries to the markers when those boundaries are within a certain distance of the markers.
- Press Ctrl+C (Command+C) or choose Edit > Copy to copy the selected region to the current clipboard.
- Click within the waveform to deselect the current region, and then click on the second marker. If you click right on the marker, the playhead will snap to it because snapping is enabled. Another option is to click somewhat before the second marker, and then click the transport’s Move Playhead to Next button (or press Ctrl+right arrow [Command+right arrow]) to move the playhead directly on top of the marker.
- 1Press Ctrl+V (Command+V) or choose Edit > Paste. The pasted verse now follows the first verse before going into the bridge. Play the file from the beginning to verify this.
You can use a similar concept to shorten music. Suppose you want to change the intro’s length to half its current length. Note that the intro repeats twice, from 0 seconds to 3.872 seconds and from 3.872 seconds up to the first marker. Here’s how to shorten the intro.
- Place a marker halfway through the intro (this happens at 3.872 seconds). Remember that the marker needs to go at the precise beginning of the beat.
- Zoom out and select the region between this new marker and the marker that indicates the start of the first verse.
- Press Ctrl+X (Command+X) or press the Delete key.
- Play the file to verify that the beginning is now half the original length.
Keep the edited Ueberschall_PopCharts.wav file open and continue. If you need to interrupt this lesson, choose File > Save As and save the file as Ueberschall_edit.