Merging wav files
Hello,
Is there a way to merge (or ‘glue’) wav files together? i.e. merging 8 one bar measures together so that they can be treated as one unit (a verse). Then that can be moved or copied as required. I am a newbie and may be overlooking something obvious, but can’t seem to find anything about this (if it is possible at all).
Thanks for any help
you can mixdown one track and replace the original track with the new version. this would accomplish your goal.
Are you wanting “looping”? That is what it sounds like, basically. Sadly, there is no hard and fast way to edit this way in n. What you need to do is to take the file and trim to the right length to loop. Then clone the track 8 times. Using the crossarrow pointer, move the different wav blocks into position. Then mixdown that section as a new file. For every new section, you will need to have a new track. Otherwise, the mixdown will contain the entire song again. Even still, there is a lot of pain in operating this way. What exactly are you trying to go? Loop a drum sample? or what? How was this original track created? Can you not simply use the same method to make the entire song at once? Why do you need to use a measure long sample? It seems more pain than it is worth to me. Just curious. Also, you could probobly use hotstepper as a looper (given you could load that long of a sample. I think you can). That would work a lot easier than n, I would think…
fish
Go to "Edit -> Non destructive -> Merge parts"
Do what you want it to?
Chuck, that only works if the parts are adjacent in the same file to begin with. In other words, you use that to remove a splice point you’d put in earlier.
Mixdown is the only way with N. You can select multiple parts and move them together, though. You just have to do that manually each time.
I think what you’re asking for is the equivalent of “Group” in drawing programs. Frankly, that would be a useful tool!
Firstly, thanks for the quick replies to my newbie first post. It’s nice to know that there are people out there willing to help, hope I can do the same for someone later on. The mixdown way will work fine and I am sure I would have eventually stumbled across this, but you’ve saved me a lot of time.
learjeff hit the nail EXACTLY on the head in describing it as the equivalent of ‘group’ in drawing programs. (especially if you could ungroup to ‘tweak’, then group back).
savingedmund is curious to what I’m trying to do, and it is interesting to know how different people approach things. (theres always more than one way to skin a cat :-).
I’m just trying to ‘sketch’ out some ideas at the moment so I’m not worried about a drum track with fills, variations etc. just something that hits the groove. I used ‘hammerhead’ just to set up a basic one measure and created a wav file of this which i imported into N and that’s where you came in. (I could actually chain measures in Hammerhead and that would acheive the same thing as mixdown in N).
My thoughts were that if you could have just linked the original one measure wav file it would save on creating the larger ‘mixdown’ wav. It’s one of those things that just becomes a bigger deal than it really is when you start to discuss it. The mixdown way that you’ve told me will work fine for what I’m trying to do.
thanks again
JohnH
p.s. link to hammerhead if interested
Hammerhead
you could honestly just copy and paste the measure and line them up to be however long you want. it doesn’t NEED to be one wav file. just be sure to press ctrl+B (snap to zero) when you’re splicing parts together.
Thanks guitars69. But would’nt that still leave me with say 128 short one bar measures running along the track to make up the song? This may be more to do with how my brain works (or doesn’t) when I’m working on a ‘traditional’ type of song. e.g. some variation on verse, chorus etc. I’ll tell you how I came to this point. I had a bass riff that I thought OK and used hammerhead to produce a ‘one bar/measure’ drum pattern and just jammed over that. Named that drum1.wav and imported into N. Copied that say 20 times (no timing problems or anything) and played the bass along working out that the ‘verse’ would need eight measures (how predictable 
. Now this is where it gets fuzzy. I know now, (thanks to you fellas) that I can mix down eight measures and call it drumsVerse.wav for instance and that file will physically exist (along with the shorter drum1.wav which would now no longer be needed). I can then import that whenever I need a drum verse part. But what I was originally wondering was whether I could just somehow reference 8 measures of the original wav file and call it ‘playVerse’ for example, so that the track knows to play eight instances of the one measure file when it comes across playVerse. i.e. you still only have the one small one measure file on disk. You could then copy the playVerse section later on down the track and eight copies of the one measure bar would also be played there. You could do the same for chorus (say with a different one measure wav file) and alternate as needed. The ‘group’ analogy in drawing programs mentioned earlier is a perfect description. You haven’t created anything new, just linked existing objects under a new name.
I then only have to think in two drum blocks for the whole song (verse,chorus) instead of having lots of little drum segments. Later instrumets wouldn’t have the same problem because I would record them in whole verse or chorus sections anyway.
The logic behind this may not seem apparent, but say later on down the line, I could have the chorus block referencing a new one bar wav file (maybe with a bit more going on) and N would know where to play it because it’s linked to the ‘chorus block’. If you were using one measure wav files over numerous different songs and ‘chaining’ them in this manner it would save a lot of disk space and keep things tidier (I think).
As I said, I’m new to the pc recording side of things and maybe it’s interesting to see how I initially thought I could acheive something. As I said the mixdown way will work fine but is not quite what I initially had in mind. I may also be talking complete drivel.
N seems a great program and this is no way a moan, it’s just a discussion point.
thanks again
JohnH
I gave a little thought to “grouping”, and I thing it would end up being a nightmare for the n-Track GUI. The trick is figuring out how to represent a group visually (and are they allowed to span tracks – they should be). Well, I think that adding any good visual cues would end up causing more GUI trouble than anything, so the only thing would be, if you click on one of the parts, all of them get selected, and they move as a group. But other than that, there wouldn’t be any visual feedback. Done that way, it might work.
It might be confusing to newbies, perhaps (because they’d try “group” for some other purpose, and their parts would get stuck together, and later they’d try to move one, and the other would move, and they’d have to post here and we’d always have to say “Be sure to UNGROUP first”, and that would lead to … 
Yes, when you think about it, you could envisage a program designed to work with sound files in this way (maybe a program already exists). So if you think of each small wave file as an object you group, say eight references to drumMeasure1.wav to make VerseDrums. This gives you one ‘box’ called verseDrums maybe you have 2 bass wav files that group to a second ‘box’ called verseBass. Then group these together to make verseRhythm. The earlier ‘boxes’ are hidden unless you drill back down to them (ungroup). And you can group and ungroup as needed while you compose. I know this is what you basically do with loops anyway, but I visualise the GUI being almost like a drawing package, so in the end, you finish up with just one ‘box’, which is your finished masterpiece.
Now, where is my copy of ‘C++ for Dummies’.
This may be redundent, redundent, redundent, but as I understand the question…you can load all track segments (1 through n) and drag each subsequent segment along the timeline in a stairstep fashion. Trim away any excess of each segment and get them in sync. Now you can mixdown to a single .wav and there y’go!
HTH
Don