Micro edits in audio clip and waveforms

Hi Everyone,

Goal is to do Editing very tiny bit snippets really of audio manel and piece things together one by one this is mostly for SFX and sound design

Since logic is not as accurate as I thought for doing micro edits in audio clip and waveforms
I was wondering what other free or paid programs are really good at this?

note: So I can do my mirco edits in that software then bring it back into logic

I came across this is
Audacity -seem free

what others are there, please?

You can get Studio One Prime for free! You won’t need anything else! :wink:

Can you show me, what you mean by „micro-edits“? Is if the waveform? Maybe upload a picture, that would help :slight_smile:

Hi there Alexey,
I will post something soon
Thank for the Tip on Studio One Prime I am going to download as soon as I get back to my computer

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Hi Alexey,
Here is a screenshot of what I mean micro editing

I cannot get as much control over the waveform or deep into the edit and Logic in this area does not loop right
I want to learn how to take bits of this and that edited them togther
Studio One Prime this will give me alots of control?

Basically, trying to directly edit the waveforms on this level is a flawed approach, and will never give you clean results. By visual standards, the dynamic range of the human ear is enormous, so you will have to zoom in by orders of magnitude to even see the finest audible details. To further complicate matters, it’s very difficult to see audible frequency/period relations in a time domain visualization, so it’s a very blunt tool from that perspective as well.

Now, what you can do is use the waveforms as visual cues for navigation, along with your ears, while using slightly higher level editing tools. For example, rather than editing the waveform directly to remove clicks and pops, to adjust attacks of percussive sounds etc, you use fades, crossfades and similar tools, to “bend” the waveform without erasing the fine details you can’t even see. For more complicated edits, you might want to work with multiple tracks/layers, so you can apply filters and other tools selectively. For even more possibilities, work in the frequency domain instead, using iZotope RX or similar.

As for looping, that’s a problem that’s a lot more complicated than it may seem at first. The first and trivial step is to make sure the loop point doesn’t cause a DC offset skip (“click”), and the standard (but not only) approach there is to make sure loop points are located at zero crossings. However, you can still get pops and thumps, as a result of drastic changes in phase and frequency content at the loop point.

There is a “quick-and-dirty” trick that can work in some cases: Cross-fade around the loop point. However, that often results in a phasing, flanging, or chorus effect. To avoid that, especially with solo instruments and the like, where it becomes very obvious, you’ll need to either search for the best possible loop point, or “force” things by phase-locking the sections around the loop points by essentially applying “full autotune” in those areas.

Sometimes, the phase/flange/chores effect is desirable, and then you can get away with just making the cross-fade the full length of the loop. Just keep in mind that if there are pre/post loop parts of the sample as well, you’ll need to “double” those as well, so the effect doesn’t apply only to the loop part.

A variation on the crossfade loop method is reverse crossfade; that is, crossfade the loop section into a reversed version of itself, and the back to the original version, offset by half the loop length, so that the actual loop point is never audible. This only works on certain types of sounds, as some sounds just sound weird if reversed. (Consider low woodwinds, for example; where each “clap” of the reed triggers a number of high frequency resonances. If you reverse it, you’ll literally hear the “reverse effect” on every cycle of the root note.)

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Later
Well before I go down that rabbit hole :see_no_evil:which I will

The Need at the Moment
I need to really learn, really well editing different audio clips in logic or any other daw

I like to record different sounds and I want to be able to edit one sound into the other

please some tips from all you experts
Looking to make some sort of a cheat sheet checklist where I can start from and then add more as I learn

I hope this make sense

Well, I can’t think of any cheat sheet or similar at the moment, so while my fingers are warmed up, and my filters are off, I’ll try to provide some hints for starters… :smiley:

The basic tools for audio editing on the DAW level are timing, gain, and (cross)fades.

Timing
Timing is, obviously about getting stuff to play when intended, but on the lower level, you may have to tweak position down to sample level, to deal with phase issues in cuts and crossfades. If you have a crossfade that causes a drop or spike in amplitude, try nudging one clip to match the overlapping parts better.

Also, timing is related to “feel,” and it’s rarely correct to place everything exactly on the grid, even when you want a 100% quantized feel. All sounds take some amount of time to build up (even though it may be a matter of just milliseconds), and some sounds have to be played before the beat to sound tight.

Gain
Gain can be a tricky bit… Naturally, you’ll want levels to match across cuts (if editing vocals, combining snippets from different takes, for example), but that is sometimes complicated by microphone proximity effects and the like. For example, if the singer has inconsistent microphone technique, adjusting the gain to compensate doesn’t really work, as microphone distance changes the frequency balance. In such cases, you may need to apply per-clip EQ to essentially match gain per frequency band instead. If there’s also reverb in the recording, well, editing starts to get real nasty… :slight_smile:

Fades
Most DAWs these days will automatically apply very quick fades (sometimes configurable) at the start and end of clips, to avoid clicks when doing “brutal” edits, but for good results, especially when dealing with low frequencies, you often have to insert longer, explicit fades and crossfades for smooth transitions.

With these methods combined, it’s even possible to create inaudible cuts in the middle of vowels in vocals and the like, but it takes a bit of work, and a bit of ear training to find the right spots. It can help to look at a spectrum analyzer, to get a better understanding of why clips you’re trying to combine match, or don’t match.

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As you said, Logic doesn’t have a good “view” representation of the audio form. The best DAW was actually ProTools when I have started. A very solid editing/mixing software, however I believe that Studio One has now better waveform views as Logic does.

And don’t forget to “zoom-in” the waveform. There are shortcuts, and in the editing window you need to find some like an “arrow up”, so you can see more what’s going on.

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