particularly drum tracks
ok im working on a cd with my band, but my drummer quit. so i played the drums for all the tracks. being that im not an amazing drummer, my timing is a little off on somethings, particularly when the tempo is fast. so anyway i have all these drum recordings and i was cutting them up and making it so that everything is on time. so that it sounds like someone with perfect timing played it, you know haha. anyway, i noticed that it is really hard to cut two things together sometimes because with a stereo wave file the two peices dont match up right. this creates a click in the audio, and while in a mix you might not hear it, id like to remove it if possible. anyway my question is, is there any program where i can smooth out extreme jagged connects between two pieces of a wave file? sort of like anti-aliasing for a wave file. ntrack will bounce two wave files together even if they join abruptly but you still hear the click. does anyone know of a way of getting around this. please no jokes about playing the drum part perfectly, obviously id like to do that…
heres an example of what i mean, i know that i could just size the two pieces until they meet, but its really hard to find a good point where both sides work since its a stereo wave file. also, this is just an example anyway, im more interested in what one could do to fix it after they bounced it to a wave file. i want to be able to take the “kink” out. anyway heres the pic:
I find the best way is to manually adjust the point at which the 2 wav files cutover.
Sometimes it will also sound better if the 2 sections (parts) don’t actually touch and join with the purple circle and if you zoom in really close there will be a gap between the 2 wav files.
The way I do it is pretty much trial and error… cut them approximately where you want the swap to occur and then visually line up where it looks like they will transition from the first to the second fairly smoothly (similar angle and cycle of the wav) and then manually change the cutover point till the click disappears.
Zooming in a lot helps as it means that a mouse movement will result in a very small nudge of the section.
HTH,
Rich
Another way would be to have merging sections on adjacent tracks, then use a fade-out of one section on track 1 say, then simultaneously fade-in the next section (on track 2). The fades will be of a duration of a quarter of a second maybe or quicker, so won’t be noticeable as fades as such, but the transitions should be smooth, without clicks etc. Alternate between the two tracks, i.e. going from 1 to 2, then 2 to 1 etc.
Then maybe do a submix of these two tracks back down to one track again.
It might help make editing easier to pan one track to the left and the other to the right - this way you’ll hear when one part is ending and the next one comes in. Return them to centre when you’ve finished editing.
JW
i have used those techniques in the past and they have worked great and i will keep them in mind. the problem is that i have some tracks that are already mixed, and have the clicks in them. can you think of any way of editing those clicks out? i could cut them out, but then ill have to screw with a lot more cutting and moving. i guess there probably is no easy way huh?
Unfortunately Prevention is probably better than cure.
However there is software around that claims to be able to get rid of clicks and pops, mainly for when copying vinyl records to digital. I’ve not tried though.
You might also be aware that Cool Edit can remove noise - using the method where you subtract one sound from another sound - i.e. hiss from a wav file. Not sure how you’d apply it in your case, but some food for thought.
JW
If you get Sound Forge, they have a function that will do exactly what you need to do here.
You can do this in a wave editor like Audacity.
thanks ill give those a try!
i got soundforge 8 and its awesome, it does everything i need and it comes with a great set of plugins. but now i have another question. i was editing in soundforge and i made a few markers at certain spots in the wave file, and then i saved it. when i loaded it in ntrack, the markers showed in the wave file. it looks like this:
my question is, if ntrack can read these from a wave file, can ntrack create these in a wave file? that would be really valuable, because when im cutting stuff in ntrack i can mark where i made the cut and then go into soundforge and just go to the marker and fix any sort of pop or click that i may have created. if adding markers to waves isnt a feature of ntrack now, is there a way i can tell flavio about it? since hes obviously already written the code to read the markers from the file, one would assume he could write the same information back out. i guess the only problem would be hed have to design some tools for people to add those markers and then apply them to the wave.
any ideas if this is possible?
BUMP
Repeating kevin’s question:
Is there any way to have n-Track write to a wave file’s cue list?
Just a thought, but those markers look like wave file “regions” created by N. You might try creating a few regions in a wave file and open it in SoundForge to see if they are displayed.
that works actually! when you open it in soundforge, it gives an error saying there were invalid regions or something and then says it has corrected it. but it does work and it does display after it say it fixes the error.
Great!
It works with CE2K too. No errors whatsoever.
Thanks!