Today’s tip is all about audio editing in Sony Sound Forge. This tip is excellent when editing audio in stereo where the right and left channel are separated.

So lets say you have two people in a podcast interview talking a back and forth. Person 1 is on the right channel and person 2 is on the left channel. During the parts where person 1 or 2 is speaking, the other person’s wave form should be flat. However you notice that there are little bumps and jolts in the wave form during those sections. When you go to highlight the empty section you can hear typing or little crackles.

Well that certainly isn’t going to work if you want a clean professional audio. So, what should you do? You could highlight the area on the one channel, hit delete, then go to Process >> Insert Silence and add back in the silence from the current cursor point. But once you do that, the audio waveform from the other channel will be interrupted by a large area of blank space and you’ll have to highlight the blank area and delete it to bring your audio back together.

So here is a quick tip: highlight the area you want to add silence to and go to Process >> Volume and drag the volume all the way down. Once you hit enter that area of the waveform will become completely flat.

You’ve now saved yourself a lot of hassle and accomplished the same task in a matter of seconds.

This tip will also work in Audacity users.

I hope that this has been helpful for you. Please leave me feedback so that I can gauge how effective these Tuesday Tips are.