Hi
I’m just learning cubase - mostly for recording guitar but I have another role where we need to record and edit spoken voice (for screencast).
To do that I need to be able to quickly edit part of audio tracks e.g. by removing er um phrases by cutting segments from the track, making parts of the track silent, inserting silence . I appreciate this is a bit different to the normal use of cubase.
What is the best way to do this currently? Would a macro be suitable?
Thanks
Nelly
Hello and welcome.
Cutting an audio recording is usually manual labour. To remove silent passages there is a function in the Audio menu.
To mute a section, cut it out and then mute it (I put mute event on my M key).
To insert silence you can either use the function from the Edit menu or take a slightly different approach: You can render audio that contains only silence (render in place an empty midi part that stretches for 60 seconds => 0 seconds of audio silence) and insert those events wherever you want to have breaks. With this approach you can use the Shuffle mode as snap type.
Just some ideas.
Outside the box solution… don’t use Cubase.
If you are on Mac Final Cut Pro used as an audio only editor is the fastest podcast/ audio book process out there.
From inside the app I send the audio to ‘Simon Says’ for a transcription. I mark the text I want to keep in the final edit and import that data to FCP. It then produces a first cut (easily word accurate) .
Then I clean things up… the magic is in the timeline which ripples in both directions perfectly for voice work. It’s sample accurate so easily deals with ums and ahs…single key crossfades, and the built in ‘voice isolator’ is the best noise remover hands down ( easily beats RX… )
I say all this because this type of workflow should be in Cubase and Nuendo by now. It’s absurd that editing audio is still pretty much like cutting tape!
Regarding Shuffle mode - this video might be helpful:
I use a pc (custom built) keen to stick with Cubase - first impressions are good and there are tooltips on icons 
I had to click past the getting started page as I have a weird setup (for silent playing/recording).
I’m on elements version that came with mixer but will likely upgrade.
I’ll have a go with @Johnny_Moneto suggestions but I see the point of @ltf3 there is something about having right tool for the job…
Nelly
I’ve been using CUBASE for over 20 years and I use Reaper for podcast dialog editing. I’m hoping v13 finally gets a proper ripple edit mode.
You can create a pseudo ripple edit in Cubase. You place the cursor as a marker for the position of where everything to its right shall be affected. You then select everything from cursor to end.
Here’s a little PLE preset that would only select events on selected tracks - thus you can make sure to move events only on the tracks you want to. Prerequisite: This preference must be toggled off
Assign a key command to the preset and your good to go.
Thanks for the tip Johnny. I’ve been using something similar. But it is still a work around. Once you use proper ripple editing there is no going back. Even wavelab has it. Please vote for the feature in the thread if you haven’t already. Though I suspect v13 will be released soon. Keeping fingers crossed!
I gave up with using cubase for screen cast voice editing - using audacity for the audio and synching up with video on another monitor - not perfect but good enough for me.
The more I use cubase I can unerstand why it’s tricky to enable basic editing due to the sophisticated nature of music recording/editing.
Nel
