See no evil / Hear no evil: TRIMMING DEAD SPACE FROM YOUR SAMPLES AND RECORDINGS

"Ever wonder how to edit wave files? Well, one thing that I do a lot of is trimming wav clips, and most of the time it's for getting rid of the silence before or after the sample I've captured. Sometimes, though, it's even for removing parts from music or an mp3. In many instances, though, I want to trim the dead space completely. This means I want to go right up to where the recorded sample starts. One thing that scares me is going past where the dead space ends and accidently trimming the first few waves of the sample itself. Audio editors are pretty sophisticated these days and have lots of bells and wistles to help avoid this. For this reason you'll probably only need steps 1-4 below and just hit delete at the end of step 4; however, if you want to make sure you're not cutting the initial parts of the sample then I have an excellently anal retentive solution for you, and it even involves using your old fasion analog ears.

1. Open your sample in your audio editor.

2. Normalize it to make sure that we're getting all of the recorded sound. Note that you may not always want to normalize a sample. I'll explain this in more detail in a future article detailing mixing and mastering. Double note...I'm not referring to the overview article!

3. In your wave form display (that's the place where you can see the drawing of your recorded sample) go to the beginning of the where your recorded sample wave starts to play. Zoom in on the x-axis (time) of this section to a point where you still have some dead space to the left. Now blow it up by zooming in on the y-axis (amplitude) until the dead silence level comes off the 0 line (the 0 is on the ruler to the left of your drawn sample and runs right through the middle of each channel). Right at that point, zoom out one so that the dead silence goes onto the 0 line.

4. Starting at the point where your sample starts to play, select all of the dead silence before that.

5. Copy this selection to a new audio track. Normalize it, turn your volume way down, and now play it. Do you hear any part of the sample start to play? If so, then you cut the sample too far to the right. Go back to the original file and back the selected part to the left. If not, then you're golden!"

e-effect
01-24-08