Regions - Fade to/from silence for a beat or two.

[ashcat_lt]

When I master my tracks, I like to have just a beat of silence, then a fade into mix, then at the end I like to fade it out and leave a bit of silence. Basically, most of the gap between songs is at the end, but I like that one beat before so if you just push the play on a given track it doesn't just go BOOM, but rather, like -inhale-BOOM.

Anyway, I'd like to be able to define my regions to include those gaps, and then run a script or action and have it automatically create Volume envelope - on the master or preferably a bus track - to do that. It can be a quick fade in most cases. Anything more dramatic will already be handled at this point. This is just what I consider best practice making sure it's actually silent, cutting off any reverb tails or whatever.

I know there's action to do 4 point envelopes at region boundaries, but I need them to be a beat (or preferably a definable period) "inside" the regions. I suppose I could have regions within regions and do the envelopes and those and then render the longer ones, but...

I'm looking at 50 mins worth of :30 "songs" that I have to sort out here. :/

[karbomusic]

I just did similar, I like 1 sec before and after the render. Nofish, whipped me up a script that does just that...

Select from the beginning of the first item, to the end of the last item, add one second to the beginning and end of that selection. I made it a button - "Select for render". Works like a treat and can't see why what you want would be much if any more difficult?

[ashcat_lt]

Yeah, that's about the opposite of what I'm looking for.

What I'm work on right now is one multitrack project where we recorded for about a half hour straight, then took a break, then recorded for a while longer. There's only like three items at all, but like fifty different "songs" I need to split out. I have to make regions in order to render them out, and if I could just do that, run a script, have the vol envelope and then render, I'd be really happy.

Edit - actually, though... For this particular project I could probably render the mix as one long file, then split out the silence and have a bunch of items that are pretty close to what I want, then something like what you're talking about could build the regions for the final render. Any chance you could share this thing?

[ashcat_lt]

What I ended up doing for this one was to just render the mix as one long thing. Then I auto-split that with a faded pad on either side. Then I went through and cleaned up some of heads and tails where autosplit got weird. Then I used SWS:Reposition... with a four beat gap. Then I duplicated that track, and selected all of the items on the new track. Then I just drag the left edge leftwards one beat (with all selected, changing one changes all) and then pull the right edge rightwards to meet the following item. Then used an action (I think it's SWS something) to create regions from selected items. Then render the first track that I had split and repositioned originally. I see now that I probably could have done that on just one track, and just put the Item edges back after creating the regions, but that's not actually faster. Ended up with 52 regions that last almost 30 minutes. It sounds like a laborious process, but it takes longer to type it than to do it, and with a little tweaking of the autosplit settings, it worked well for this particular project...

...but it won't work as well in (most) other situations where I want the gaps to be individual. This might seem strange to some, but I very often end up adding the main "ambience" reverb at the mastering stage, but I want my gaps to be actually silent. Like, the song itself ends, the verb trails out a bit from there, but it needs to go to silence for a couple beats before the next song. Part of that is about setting the reverb - and the gaps - appropriately, but sometimes it can't work that way, and I don't really trust that just because I can't hear it, it's not going to cause a pop or other weirdness when the (final, consumer) track ends. I want to fade that to silence.

So anyway, I need something very much like that "Create 4 point envelope at region boundaries" thing that I saw on some video, except I need those points to be inside the region boundaries rather than at. But then, the "right way" to do it is draw it in by hand and by ear. That's easier when I have like 8 or 10 songs rather than 52, but the cost/benefit ratio here is pretty skewed, I think.