Audio Event: Close gaps without overlap, stretch, or crossfades (to the next event or event limit)

A bit difficult to describe so let me do so via photos. This is my audio event:

{7DD155A6-DC19-43D9-8AAA-E6126A79F61B}
As you can see, it is a nearly a full beat in total length.

Lets say I create a loop with it (over one beat):

Occasionally, I will do something that will affect the length of the audio clip (like changing the song tempo), resulting in either overlap:

Or gaps:

Is there an easy way to get the clip to fill those gaps, or remove the overlaps by extending or shortening from the end? The “fill gaps” options do not do what I wish - crossfades does nothing, and time stretch obviously changes the sound.

In other words, I want it to go back to looking like the second image above (after I “created a loop”).

Obviously I can do this by selecting each group and extending the length manually, but when the entire track is affected, this is quite a slow process. I would like to do this using one or two key commands, like how the Legato option works with MIDI (with Midi, I will use Fixed Lengths → Legto in order to close gaps).

Hi,
select all events within the loop (or do it with the Range tool) and open the Render dialogue (Edit/Render in Place/Render Settings). Pick the Mode “As One Event” (maybe you want to give the loop a dedicated name having the next step in mind) and Render.
Not only does this create a new track in your project window but also a clip in your Pool. Open the Pool (Ctrl + P) and select your newly created loop. Now, make sure that the tempo matches the current project tempo and check the box Musical Mode:
image

Last step: Activate Musical timebase on your new loop track and you are set:

From now on, your loop and all events within will act as one and weather all tempo changes that may come. Till the end of time :wink:

I’m familiar with Render-In-Place; that’s not an ideal solution here, but thanks for the suggestion. I wish to maintain the individual audio events in case I wish to make modifications later.

That is non-destructive.
However, you want to have the same result as described in the method above but with a loop containing multiple events, right?

Destructibility is not the issue. The issue is workflow.

No. I want to keep the same [number of] events I have, not consolidate it to one (meaning I do not want to “glue” nor “render” the events together). I want to re-adjust the ends to fit the grid space they did originally (or extend the audio clips as far as they will go, whichever comes first). Your method of rendering the object first has a couple problems:

  1. It requires the object to be rendered before anything else causes the “gaps” or “overlaps” (usually tempo changes, but there may be other reasons such as accidentally changing the lengths).
  2. When the object is rendered, if a tempo change is desired, a change in audio will occur, as the single audio event is now being time stretched to fit the new tempo.

What I am suggesting will simply extend (or contract) the end of the audio clip - resulting in either more (or less) of the audio event being played – and zero changes to the sound itself.

The “loop” itself is irrelevant. I simply want to know if there is a command or method to extend the end of the selected audio events until the either

  1. Collide (not overlap) with another audio event (on the same track) or
  2. Reach the maximum length of the audio clip.

If this doesn’t make sense, try this with midi:

  1. Create a midi event
  2. Draw in a midi note at 1/16th note on beat 1, and another 1/16th note on beat 2
  3. Select these two midi notes then select MIDI → Functions → Legato

The first note will extend to 1 full beat (until it collides with the next note), and the next note will extend until the end of the midi event.

I want to do the same thing, but with audio events.

EDIT:

better answer:


original answer (not the solution OP was looking for):

If

  • your source audio is marked as musical mode,

and

  • your tracks are marked as being in musical mode,

changing tempos should work like you want without needing to render the audio, because audio gets compressed or stretched on the fly to match the tempo.

I’m just now working with a song, where I’m still experimenting with different tempos and it works fine without overlaps or gaps.
[/s]

@chaosbringer , what’s not clear to me is, WHY you want to close the gaps. Maybe I misunderstood details from your topic, but no advantage about those closed gaps comes to my mind.
The MIDI comparison about Legato is something else, since it makes the note sound longer (unless the sound is percussive or short), while your audio wave is not wanted to sound longer, IIRCA.
So what’s the advantage you are aiming for?

@Nico5

your source audio is marked as musical mode, and your tracks are marked as being in musical mode,

This is not often the case and usually not due to musical mode warping the audio in many cases

because audio gets compressed or stretched

Again, I do not want this.

@Northunder

WHY you want to close the gaps.

You literally answer it with your next statement:

The MIDI comparison about Legato is something else, since it makes the note sound longer

No, that is EXACTLY the same thing with the audio that I am trying to achieve here:
There is more in the audio clip and I want that additional sound to play if there are gaps where they can be played, and they can be cut when not.

You saw the clips in the picture, right? The original sample is 1 full beat long and I am playing 1/16th of it or less at the initial tempo. When the tempo changes there is space between the sound OR overlap - both of which cause undesirable sound (overlap frequently causes portions to not play correctly, where as gaps cause, well silence of course).

If I just wanted to “close gaps”, I would just “bounce” the audio loop or R-I-P.

Anyway judging from the responses, it’s pretty obvious that there isn’t an easy way to do this. We can just close the topic and I’ll try and find a solution. It’s not a big deal since this usually only occurs in my case early in the track when I’m still working on ideas. However, I’ve ran into issues many times before where I would miss correcting some of the audio lengths and not realize it until much later in the production when I would beat my head over why something isn’t sounding right (because some clips were overlapping that I missed correcting).

If you’d said what sort of use case you were talking about in the first place - that would have spared a lot of confusion. Like what sort of sounds and what you wanted to do with them.

Was my original post not clear enough? I provided images and everything…

Anyway, marking my previous comment as a solution since the answer is clearly “it’s not possible”, and not holding my breath that Steinberg actually implements any requests on these forums…

Okay - now I understand better.

Maybe there’s a way of doing that by using track lanes?

However you’d need to prepare the audio tracks in question

  • musical mode off in for the source audio file in the pool window
  • musical mode on for the selected track, if you want the starting points of each audio event to be fixed to the same bar after changing tempo.
  • Move each successive audio event to it’s own lane
  • Select all of the resulting events, and lengthen them all by a generous amount
  • Hide the lanes to reduce the clutter in the project window.

The resulting audio track (before hiding the lanes) ends up looking something like this:

Now you can change the tempo, and the each audio event will start at the same bar position, but will always play to the beginning of the next one.

p.s. The step to create lanes may not be strictly necessary, but it guarantees which audio event is “in front” and therefore being played.

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@chaosbringer You got me wrong. Nothing wrong with you description which was very detailed. An additional info like what sort of sample are you talking about would have been helpful.
Anyways, your issue might also be solvable with the help of the logic editor and combining multiple operations with a key command. However, that seems to be more complicated and less elegant than @Nico5 's solution.

Nico5’s solution doesn’t work when utilizing “delete overlaps” setting, which I do. (Side note - the delete overlap setting doesn’t delete overlaps caused by this issue, which is good tbh as it would cause the undesired effect of deleting the beginnings of audio clips). It honestly would be a good workaround, but I really like the delete overlap setting in every other case. If only there were a way to disable “delete overlaps” in lanes only…

An additional info like what sort of sample are you talking about

I have no idea what you mean by that.

might also be solvable with the help of the logic editor

That was the first thing I looked into, however found no way of it accomplishing this task. There doesn’t appear to be a way to determine the end point of a selected audio clip via the logical editor unfortunately (in other words, there isn’t a way to calculate the end length of sample 1 based on sample 2’s start point).