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].
#9

I have a video track in my session and when I delete time by either of Robin’s methods, the video does not move. Ardour 8.6 compiled from source. Is there a patch?

Thanks

#12

Ardour isn’t a video editor.

The video support is to allow you to compose audio onto a video that has already been edited to its final state.

Cheers,

Keith

#13

Thank you.

Yes, I fully agree Ardour is not a video editor. But the time offset that a video starts at is a parameter that is freely editable in all of the ways that apply to an audio source. However, the presence of the video track in the group of tracks being adjusted in these ways is ignored. Since the video’s sound track is easily affected by such edits, it would be surely be sensible for the video itself to be likewise affected. This is not an edit to the video itself.

I would suggest that the appropriate fix requires very little code and its omission is an oversight.

DJG

#14

No, Ardour is not intended to do anything at all to the video, not even altering the start time.

The model is that you edit the video elsewhere, and import it into Ardour for work on the audio.

If that model doesn’t work for your workflow, then other tools are recommended.

#15

Sorry to disagree, but you can indeed alter the start time in Ardour. It just slides along.

The workflow in use is the following, which is not the only solution to the problem, but is the one I have at the moment.

  1. The boys filmed 8 videos, miming to a backing track. These were edited by a third party and supplied separately and delivered as separate video files.

  2. The boys then played all 8 songs in one Ardour multi-track session, doing two or three consecutive takes of some of them.

  3. One of the videos is imported and is slid along (using the start time edit that Ardour does indeed support) and a good match for one of the tracked sessions to the cut video is found. Ardour works very well in this respect.

  4. Everything else (all the other songs) is deleted from the multi-track session, causing the chosen audio take, that is nicely aligned with the video, to move close to time code zero in the session. This session is then saved for further overdubs and mixing.

What I am saying is that the delete in step 4 does not work properly at the moment. Further, I think it would require a very minimal change for the video track to be handled pari passu with the audio tracks in this respect and I would welcome its addition.
.
DJG

#16

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