Shorten silences before editing - Audition Tutorial

- In this lesson, we're going to cover how to shorten silences before you edit your audio in your multi-track editor. We'll also cover how to do this after you've created a mixdown. One very powerful technique that will save you a lot of time editing is the shorten silence tool. It's a great way to handle long pauses in podcasts. You can either do this after you create a mixdown, which we'll go over later. It's basically like editing a single audio file in the waveform editor, but you can actually use this shorten silence tool before you edit in the multi-track editor. Shortening silences ahead of time before you actually edit in the multi-track editor just saves you a whole bunch of time. So here's the method for you guys. Say you had two audio files to work with that you've already synced up. You have it aligned in the multi-track and you're ready to edit it. What you can do to get rid of all the extra pauses and keep things in sync is to create a new audio file and make it stereo. From there, toggle the right channel off and then copy the entire file for one of the audio files and then paste it to the left channel only. After that, do the same for the other person's audio file and paste that to the right channel instead. So turn off the left channel. Now you have two different audio files on the left and right side of a single stereo file. From there, you can do the same thing with the shortened silences, and it'll basically have the same exact effect and only cut out silences that are shared between the files, which are moments where both people were silent. After you shorten the silences, you can bring the audio files back to the multi-track by clicking the arrow next to the name of the stereo file we just edited. Then click on the multi-track session and drag in each file from that dropdown. And then you have yourself a shortened silence version of the audio files that you wanted to work on from the beginning. This means that you'll be editing a shorter version instead of the longer version, saving you time. It's up to you which approach you want to do. Again, you can do this either after creating the mixdown, or you can do this before editing in the multi-track. Just make sure that if you're going to connect this to video, shortening silences is just not an option because it's going to make you out of sync with the video. So this is mainly an audio only tip. The assignment for this lesson is to do exactly what I did during this lesson. Create a stereo file, then copy over two tracks, and then use delete silence to see for yourself how it works. From there, bring it back to the multi-track editor and do your multi-track editing.