Digital Performer: How Can I Silence a Fragment of Audio?

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In article <QND7e.2984$h6.71@tornado.texas.rr.com>,
Gary Morrison <mr88cet@texas.net> wrote:

> In digital performer, is there any easy way to select a region of audio
> - just simply hilight it - and silence that audio? I mean truly silence
> it, as in modifying the audio data itself.

In one simple step, AFAIK no.

Simply hitting delete after highlighting will cut that part of the audio
file, essentially muting it. And 'looks' like silence if you were to
bounce that track down.

hth,

--
Cyrus

*coughcasaucedoprodigynetcough*

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If it's DP 4.x, select the region then click the "X" tool from the
toolbar on it to mute it. It will also grey out so you can tell it's
muted visually. X it again to unmute it.

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Gary Morrison wrote:
> That's fine within a soundbite, but where that doesn't work is if you

> need a passage of silence at the end of a soundbite, such as for a
final
> reverb tail. And of course you have to create a single soundbite for

> everything, if you want to have a place for a reverb tail to exist.

Maybe this is too easy, but you could just set up an additional track
to record and not send any input, thereby recording silence. Cut &
paste a portion of the 'silent' recording onto the end of the soundbite
that requires the reverb tail. Merge those soundbites and 'voila'!

Also, you could try asking at www.unicornation.com, the forum for all
things MOTU. Might be a more focused group to ask about that.

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prestokid@aol.com wrote:

> If it's DP 4.x, select the region then click the "X" tool from the
> toolbar on it to mute it. It will also grey out so you can tell it's
> muted visually. X it again to unmute it.

Muting, if I recall correctly, doesn't actually silence the audio data
itself. It instead marks that patch to be silenced in playback. If you
then move that soundbite, I don't think the muting marker moves with it.

Also as I recall, if you mute, fade, or do volume/pan automation on a
soundbite, and then apply a plug-in in batch to it (i.e., using the
"Apply" button in the plug-in window), the mute or fade applies to the
plug-in "output" rather than acting as "input" into the plug-in. For
example, if you mute a passage and then apply a reverb to it, it will
mute the reverb tail rather than creating a silent input passage with a
reverb tail trailing off.

What worked at least pretty quickly was to highlight the appropriate
passage, then run the "Dynamics" plug-in on it, that plug-in being set
to zero input volume and zero output volume. That unequivocally
produces a passage of silence to which I can then apply a reverb tail or
whatever, but I first have to merge that resulting soundbite into the
original.

I wish they had a single menu click to apply all forms of dynamics
(fades, mutes, and automation) to one or more soundbites. That is, as
far as the dynamics themselves are concerned, behaving as if we were
bouncing them to disk, but acting like a applying a plug-in: Off
real-time, replacing the audio itself (undoably), and putting the
results in an exactly-equivalent set of soundbites.

--

(Preferably reply to the newsgroup, please. If you reply by Email, I
will sincerely try to receive your message, but it will probably get
buried in spam.)

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> Simply hitting delete after highlighting will cut that part of the audio
> file, essentially muting it. And 'looks' like silence if you were to
> bounce that track down.

(Bounce or merge soundbites.)

That's fine within a soundbite, but where that doesn't work is if you
need a passage of silence at the end of a soundbite, such as for a final
reverb tail. And of course you have to create a single soundbite for
everything, if you want to have a place for a reverb tail to exist.

Admittedly, what I'm doing here is perhaps a little unusual: I'm not
doing a traditional multitracking-like construction of music, and then
creating a final mixdown of everything. I'm creating a very large set
of very short foreign-language (Mandarin) vocabulary exercises, each
perhaps 10-15 seconds long. Each of them has to be a its own single
soundbite that I later need to export to a block of audio that becomes a
very short track on a CD.

So, each such exercise has to exist within a single soundbite so that it
can be exported as a distinct audio chunk. So, deleting a short passage
of audio wouldn't work, because it is no longer contained in a single
exportable soundbite.

--

(Preferably reply to the newsgroup, please. If you reply by Email, I
will sincerely try to receive your message, but it will probably get
buried in spam.)

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In article <QND7e.2984$h6.71@tornado.texas.rr.com>, Gary Morrison
<mr88cet@texas.net> wrote:

> In digital performer, is there any easy way to select a region of audio
> - just simply hilight it - and silence that audio? I mean truly silence
> it, as in modifying the audio data itself.

How about opening it in the audio editor, selecting the part you want to
silence and hitting delete. If you then save/export the file it should
make the change permanent. Works for me, but I have only version 3.0.

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

> Maybe this is too easy, but you could just set up an additional track
> to record and not send any input, thereby recording silence. Cut &
> paste a portion of the 'silent' recording onto the end of the soundbite
> that requires the reverb tail. Merge those soundbites and 'voila'!

In a few cases, I did that using patches of silence from other
surrounding soundbites.

--

(Preferably reply to the newsgroup, please. If you reply by Email, I
will sincerely try to receive your message, but it will probably get
buried in spam.)

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

> How about opening it in the audio editor, selecting the part you want to
> silence and hitting delete. If you then save/export the file it should
> make the change permanent. Works for me, but I have only version 3.0.

That then still keeps it all in a single (i.e., the original) soundbite
rather than breaking it up into two soundbites?

--

(Preferably reply to the newsgroup, please. If you reply by Email, I
will sincerely try to receive your message, but it will probably get
buried in spam.)