Simple crop/delete tasks

Getting Stuff Done How do I .... ?
#1

Just moved from Audacity to Ardour and I can’t figure out how to simply delete portion of tracks.

In Audacity, selecting and deleting joins up the audio on either side, but Ardour replaces the deleted segment with silence.

I can’t see any instructions for this in the manual, but I assume it’s easy to do somehow.

Any tips?

#2

While it may seem obvious for a single track in a soundfile editor (like Audiacity), this is not a common operation in a multi-track DAW.

e.g. if you remove 00:00:45:00 to 00:00:50:00 of your guitar solo. the rest of of the solo after 00:00:50:00 should still be in sync with all other other tracks an not move.

That being said, there are a couple of ways to achieve what you want.

  • remove time on all selected track at a give position. -> select tracks (click in the track-header, left side of the editor) then Menu > Track > Remove time (example here: insert-time: http://robin.linuxaudio.org/tmp/insert_time.mp4 )

or

  • change edit more to “Ripple” top left in the editor there’s the “Edit Mode” (slide, ripple, lock). In Ripple edit mode all changes are applied to the current region and all later regions. When deleting a range (or region) all later regions are moved backwards by the amount

or

  • afterselect two (or more) regions Menu > Region > Edit > Close Gaps (also available in the context-menu) to close the gap after the fact, optionally with cross-fades for a smooth transition
1 Like
#3

Thanks Robin

That’s 90% of my editing tasks!

Doesn’t look like Ardour is much use to me, unfortunately.

#4

Ripple mode should do the trick, then.

but yes, if you’re mainly doing single-track destructive edits, a DAW is not the right tool.

#5

Hi,
In my project my tracks all start together at 56 sec, which corresponds to 029|01|0000, before that all of them are empty.
I would like to drag them all to 0 sec. So I select one track, go to Tracks, Delete time, set origin to 001|01|0000 and time to delete to 029|01|0000. I select “Apply to all tracks”, and whatever other boxes I tick, I can’t get to a clear cut of these 56 sec.
Some tracks are moved by another amount of time, some automations are moved without their tracks, the whole thing is a mess.

Is there a way to solve this?
Thanks

#6

Okay, so deleting the first few seconds of all the tracks at the same time seems impossible without major bugs, even if there are no sound track, no automation point, nothing in this time interval.
Or you have to reconstruct everytime some automation points decided not to move, or to move to far. Meaning… pretty much everywhere, so good luck with that when you have close to a hundred of automation tracks, with dozens of points in each.

Moving separately tracks and automation tracks takes so much time, and you end up messing up your tracks, because again all automation tracks don’t always want to move easily.

Maybe I don’t see the complexity of it, but since this area in the begining is empty (again, no automation point!), it should just require to shift everything as one block. I don’t get it.

#7

Okay… thanks for your help.

#8

In case someone finds this thread looking for answers: it seems to be quite easy and straightforward to remove sections across tracks with Ardour 5.12.

  1. Select all the tracks to affect.
  2. Select the range you want to remove. It will highlight in all selected tracks.
  3. Make sure you have Edit Mode set to Ripple.
  4. Track > Remove Time…
    The dialog will have the selected range filled in, so just check ‘Move Markers’ as appropriate and click [Remove Time].