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Quick manipulation of soundbites is useful inany audio-heavy project. Here, two

soundbites are being duplicated to extend arhythm track, while others have had fades

and edge-edits applied.

By holding down modifier keys whiledragging soundbites, you can apply a variety

of simple editing actions directly. Shown hereare the mouse pointers that reflect three of

these: the 'move' hand, the 'duplicate' hand

and the 'throw' hand.

Fades and crossfades can be directly applied to soundbiteedges by dragging fade handles. Shown here is the mouse

pointer when dragging out a fade (the one with the blue arrows)and when selecting an existing fade (the simpler, curvy X).

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Audio Editing Essentials In DP5 : December 2006

Audio Editing Essentials In DP5Digital Performer Notes & Technique

Technique : Digital Performer Notes

We take a look at a variety of audio-relatedtechniques, from the staples of soundbiteediting to DP5 's new Soundbite Volumefeature.

Robin Bigwood

MOTU's Digital Performer is a superbaudio editor, especially incomparison with some other software sequencers. The keys to itspower in this area are the flexibility of the soundbite-based systemfor manipulating regions of audio, the way in which the SequenceEditor allows viewing of soundbites right down to single-samplelevel, and the easy application of all sorts of non-destructive editingtasks. As is usual with DP , though, there are any number of ways toperform essentially the same task, and we users sometimesgetinto a habit of working in one way when an easierand morestreamlined method is staring us in the face. So this month it's backto basics with audio editing, as we revisit some crucial conceptsand techniques.

Essentials

Before you can do much audio editing, you needto at least know the basics, and perhaps most basic of all isthe simple act of selecting soundbites so that you can do things with them. To try out some of thesetechniques, you might want to record or import some audio, and have a few soundbites on the screen in frontof you in the Sequence Editor window.

Selecting Soundbites: Selecting a soundbite as a whole is easy:assuming you've got DP 's default arrow tool selected, you just pointanywhere in the top two-thirds or so of the soundbite, and awayfrom the left and right edges, and click. With one soundbiteselected, hold down the Shift key and click other soundbites in thesame way to add themto the selection.

Sometimes you'll need to deselect soundbites, and there areseveral ways to do this. With many selected, clicking on an emptysection of any track will deselect themall in one go,as will theimmensely useful Apple-D (Deselect All) shortcut. But to deselect just one or two, hold down the Shift key once more and click theirtop halves individually. This is a shortcut that adds soundbites to orremoves themfrom a selection.

Moving Soundbites: So, with a soundbite selected, what can youdo with it? Well, of course you can move it, either elsewhere in thesame track or on to a different track of the same type (mono,stereo, or n-channel surround). Again, just click the soundbite in itsupper two-thirds, away from the edges, and drag it to its newposition. The mouse pointer turns into a 'one finger' hand to confirmthat you're moving the soundbite.

As you drag a soundbite like this, a number of keyboard shortcutscan be brought into play, and they help enormously with all kinds ofediting tasks. For example:

Hold down the Alt key to duplicate the soundbite(s). DP indicates that this is happening by replacing theone-finger-hand mouse pointer with a two-finger-hand!

Hold down the Applekey to toggle the current Edit Grid setting. What does this mean? If you've got aquarter-note Edit Grid enabled, for example, but need to adjust the position of a soundbite bya fineramount, using the Applekey as you drag turns off the edit grid temporarily. The same goes for the BeatGrid.

Hold down Shift as you drag a soundbite from onetrack to another, to force the soundbite to exactlymaintain its time location — it'll be 'verticallyconstrained', as a graphics program might put it.

Press the Ctrl key to enable you to 'throw' thesoundbite left or right along the track, to perfectly

abut soundbites earlier or later. You can alsothrow a soundbite back to the beginning of thetrack, if no other soundbites precede it in thesame track. DP confirms that you're about tothrow by turning the mouse pointer into a right- orleft-facing 'pitching' hand (although us Brits mightprefer the term 'bowling') and then you simplyrelease the mouse button. The way you decide

Essentials

News: Black LionAudio

Fades

Edge-editing

Using TheSoundbite VolumeFacility

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Positioning the mouse pointer

at the left or right edge of asoundbite and then dragging

allows its boundaries to be

trimmed — a fundamental audioediting technique.

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which direction to throw is by making the very firstmove of the soundbite, before you press down the Ctrlkey, in that direction (see screens above).

There are two important things to note about these audio-editing key modifiers. First, they can be usedtogether in almost any combination. So you could use the Alt and Ctrl keys to simultaneouslymake aduplicate of a soundbite and throw it to a new location, for example. Second, they all work most reliably if youpress the modifier key only after you've begun to move your soundbite. The reason for this is that pressingsome of them before then can cause other things to happen. For example, if you hold down the Alt key firstand then click on a soundbite's title bar, you'll end up renaming the soundbite. And if you hold down Ctrl andthen point at a soundbite that isn'talready selected, you'll end up makinga time-rangeselection in its track.The easiest way is to remember this: drag first, modifier key second.

News: Black Lion Audio

Owners of MOTU audio interfaces, especially slightly older models such as the 828 MkI, 1224 and 2408 MkIand MkII II, might be interested in the work of Chicago-based Black Lion Audio. They're a small but seriousoutfit with a distinctly 'alternative' flavour, offering modifications and upgrades to analogue signal-pathcomponents and internal converter clocks of MOTU and other manufacturers' interfaces. These mods areclaimed to improve noise, distortion and jitter specifications, with a distinct improvement in subjective audioperformance too. However, they have some pretty serious implications. For example, the clock modificationleaves your MOTU interface unable to sync to external equipment via AES, SPDIF or ADAT (although WordClock should still work fine), and totally incompatible with operating systems other than recent versions of OSX. Even the analogue-stage mod, naturally, will void any remaining warranty on your interface. Having said that,there's a growing following for Black Lion's work on various Internet forums, and while you might think twiceabout sending off your rack of recently purchased HD192s, for example, one of their mods could be worth ashot if you're of an experimental disposition and have an older interface. I must add that I don't currently haveany first hand experience of Black Lion-modded MOTU interfaces, so it's really a case of 'modder beware'!More information is available from www.blacklionaudio.com.

Fades

Earlier versions of DP applied fade-ins and fade-outs to soundbites (andcrossfades between abutting soundbites) using a dedicated Fades dialogue

box. This is still useful — even essential, as we'll see in a minute — but now it'sgenerally easier to use the dedicated 'handles' that every soundbite isequipped with. These are found near the top left or right corner of thesoundbite, looking like a small coloured square, and when the mouse pointer isbrought near themit turns into a 'fades' pointer, which looks a little like twocrossed swords (see screens, right). Clicking and dragging these handlescauses a fade-in or fade-out, or a crossfade, depending on the context, to beoverlaid on the soundbite or soundbites. Once it's in place it can be extendedor shrunk, or completely removed, in the same way.

The default fade type is the straight, linear 'EqualGain' fade. However, thealternative, more curvy 'Equal Power' fade is normally more useful, especiallyfor speech or audio editing. To get DP to start using these instead, justgenerate a fade as described above. Then move the mouse pointer into thethe darker region inside the fade you just created (you might need to zoom in alittle to see this, in the case of very short fades). The mouse pointer changes into a curvy 'X' shape — similarto before, but without the blue arrows. Click to select the entire fade,and then hit Ctrl-F to bring up the Fadesdialogue box. Click the Equal Power optionand make sure the pop-up menu is set to 'Fade selected timeranges', then click OK. Your fade will be rewritten and DP will now create Equal Power fades until toldotherwise.

Edge-editing

It's not just fade handles that live at the outer edges of soundbites. By movingyour mouse pointer to the veryfar left or right of a soundbite's waveform display (but not its solid-coloured title bar), you can access theedge-editing pointer, which looks like two blue arrows either side of a squarebracket.This allows you to trimthe left and right edges of the soundbite by simplyclicking and dragging — one of the most useful techniquesfor clearing up unnecessaryaudio in the run-in or run-out of a take.

Edge-editing is really straightforward and intuitive, but has one crucially important complication. By default,DP applies the same edge-edit you make to a single soundbite to any other duplicate of that soundbite usedelsewhere in your sequence. You might have duplicated a soundbite of backing vocals, for example, andused it several times in the same song. Editing just one of them would cause all the others to change in thesame way too. Depending on whether you reallydo want to edit lots of occurrences of the same audio in onefell swoop or not, this is either a tremendous time-saver or a curse of project-wrecking proportions. So if youneed the flexibility to be able to edit just one occurrence of a soundbite used in several places, click theSequence Editor's mini-menu and choose 'Edge Edit Copy'. This breaks the link between the multipleoccurrences, and they'll now edit independently from each other.

In the next Digital Performer feature, I'll be looking at more sophisticated audio editing techniques, andexplaining how to deal with commonpractical scenarios.

Using The Soundbite Volume Facility

If ever there was an opportunity for confusion over terminology in DP , it's with two related features that wereintroduced in version 5: Soundbite Gain and Soundbite Volume.

In last month's Digital Performer feature, I looked at Soundbite Gain, anon-destructive boost or cut in level that can be applied to individualsoundbites. It's great for coping with soundbites of differing overalllevel that you want to use together on the same track, and saves youhaving to resort to the sledgehammer of volume automation to crack arelatively simple nut.

Soundbite Volume is rather a different beast, but it's still a simple

concept. It's volume automation which is contained in the soundbiterather than tied to a fixed position in the track, so that if the soundbiteis moved, duplicated or exported, it carries its volume changes with it.In fact, it has very little indeed to do with DP 's 'main' automationscheme. For example, Soundbite Volume doesn't result in MixingBoard volume faders moving around. Nor does it interfere with existingtrack-based volume automation — the two work independently of eachother, and any simultaneous track-based volume and soundbitevolume changes are dealt with cumulatively. You don't even have to




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have a track's automation playback enabled to use Soundbite Volume, which makes it very straightforward.

Here's a typical example of when you might press Soundbite Volume into service. I've got a soundbite of abrass lick, which is going to be used throughout my sequence, where one note's swell gets just too loud.Rather than trying to fix this one small problem with compression, I'm going to use some Soundbite Volumeautomation to reduce the level momentarily during the swell.

1. After opening the Sequence Editor and locating my soundbite, I need to switch my view of the track it's on to'Bite Volume'. If I'm sufficiently zoomed into the track vertically, I do this with the topmost 'Edit' mini-menu in thetrack info pane on the left hand side of the window. If my track is zoomed quite small, I do this instead byclicking the small Track Settings Menu button, choosing the Edit sub-menu, and finally selecting Bite Volume.

2. The soundbite is shown overlaid with a faint horizontal line,which matches the track's colour. You'll see, too, that the left edgeof the track has acquired some simple level markings, and aneven fainter grey horizontal line across the length of the track

indicates the 0dB 'unity' position (see screen above).3. In this case, I want to draw in a V-shaped curve to tame theloud swell. I make sure my tools palette is open, by hitting Shift-O. Then I select Straight Line from its Reshape Flavour pop-upmenu, and finally switch to the pencil tool by pressing and holding the 'P' key.

4. Now I'm free to click and drag on the soundbite to draw in volume data. As I mouse around , DP indicates thepointer's time location and Bite Volume level in the Event Info Bar at the top of the window, allowing preciseplacement of data (see screen below).

5. Once my V-curve is in place, I only need to play my track to audition the results, and the Bite Volumebreakpoints can be easily modified just by dragging them with DP 's arrow tool. Once I'm happy, duplicating thesoundbite also duplicates the volume data, so it'll be accurately reproduced anywhere I choose to use thesoundbite.

As you can see, getting started with Soundbite Volume is veryeasy, and you may find it more useful and easier to deal with thantrack-based volume automation for a variety of tasks. If you doget into it, there are some other things you should know andmight want to experiment with:

You don't have to use the pencil tool to write automation breakpoints — you can just click on the automation line with the arrow tool, then

drag. However, an odd quirk means that in the case of a soundbite thatotherwise has no volume data, the first breakpoint you place like this

will always create a sudden 'stair step' deviation from the 0dB line, not

a smooth 'ramp'. Using the pencil tool gets around this 'feature'!

Some Audio menu items relate to Soundbite Volume. They're all in the Bite Volume and Gain sub-menu and are mostly

self-explanatory. To use Clear Bite Volume and erase all the volume automation for a soundbite in one go, make sureyou select at least one breakpoint first. The same goes for Toggle Bite Volume Bypass, which disables Bite Volume on

an individual soundbite basis but leaves the data in place in case you need it again.

Bite Gain (covered in last month's article) and Bite Volume work independently of each other. For example, if you have

some Bite Volume automation in place, and then you boost the soundbite's gain, the breakpoints and automation curvestay put, but the overall level of the soundbite increases.

Published in SOS December 2006

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