Can't record really SHORT track!

[ulrichburke]

Dear Anyone.

Was trying to get a sidestick sample for my drum program. So I copied the 'click' from a track - that's what a sidestick is, just incase the reader doesn't know, it's the 'click' sound when you hit the edge of a snare drum with the stick. It played fine in Audacity but WAY too much reverb. So I selected just the 'hit', the very initial bit of the sound, which lasted for about half a second if that. And exported that as a .WAV.

And got nothing. It played fine in Audacity, the resultant .WAV file had no sound in it (sounds crazy, is true.) Tried exporting as .MP3, same problem. So I got another .MP3 track and tried chopping off the first word the singer sung, right at the very beginning just before the backing started. Again, it played fine in Audacity, but resulting .MP3 export and .WAV export were blank. Kept on trying slightly longer bits of the track - and discovered there's a THREE SECOND MINIMUM (approx, might have been a tiny bit longer, definitely wasn't any less than that) in Audacity. If the sound's any shorter than that, Audacity can play it but can't export it in any form that I can find. Which includes .WAV, .MP3 and Ogg Vorbis.

Which is a REAL bummer, because if I have my sidestick sample that long it's unuseable - you get too much reverb and you can't tie it in tempo-wise with the rest of the track. Anyone know how to record REALLY SHORT .WAV files in Audacity? Or cut a tiny bit off a long file so you've got a sample less than a second long, and then export it as a .WAV (preferably)?

My version is 1.2.6. My comp. is a PC with 1gig RAM, a 1.76ghz processor and a Gigabyte (that's the manufacturer's name, nothing to do with capacity) motherboard.

Yours puzzledly

ulrichburke

[kozikowski]

While we figure out the file length problem, you can patch your drum hit with the "Silence" tool. Select the area after the hit that you don't want and Control-L. That will reduce the selected sound to dead silence. Tune as needed. It's Command-L on a Mac, so I think Control-L is correct on Windows.

Koz

[ulrichburke]

Dear Kozilkowski

Thanks for such an amazingly prompt reply, has to be an Internet record for a response to a user's problem! You're absolutely right, CTR=:L DOES cut out everything selected. Thing is, in this instance it doesn't help. Because you've got a perfect hit, followed by - for argument's sake, I haven't timed this exactly - about 2.5 seconds of silence. Which means when you play it in the drum sampler program, you can't hear the sound more frequently than once every 3 seconds or so because that's the only instant the sound is actually THERE if you see what I mean. The sampler has to play the whole loop, including all the silence surrounding the actual noise, before it can start playing the loop again. And 3 seconds is a long time in a piece of music, if you think of the rhythm of a track, you can see the beat - the sidestick in this case - might come up every less than 2 seconds of the song. Sounds fast, but have a listen to a song with a drumbeat of any kind and you'll see how short tie time between the beats is - if there was an enforced gap of two seconds or so before the drummer could hit the drum again, lots of songs just wouldn't work. You can't even use it as an occasional beat sound between ordinary drum beats because of the gap of silence before you'd actually hear it.

And if I cut off the silence after creating it, you're back to the initial problem. You're left with a VERY short soundfile, which is great, is just what you want - but you can't export it. Because, again, all you get is silence.

I'm very sorry to have to say all of the above after you tried to find a solution for me, but the workaround don't work.

I know what I'm about to say is about a rival product but it might well have bearing on this problem. I tried using NCH Wavepad and got EXACTLY the same problem. It was the free version of Wavepad - if you've got a Mac, I don't know if that would work on yours - I chopped just the very start of the hit off, it sounded great, wouldn't export. What have we hit here? How do they create short sound samples if you can't export them from anything?

Yours respectfully

From a VERY puzzled user

Chris.

[billw58]

Hmmmm ... sounds like this might be an inherent limitation of the WAV format? Try exporting as AIF and see if that makes any difference.

-- Bill

[steve]

sounds like this might be an inherent limitation of the WAV format?

Nope. I've just Exported 0.007 seconds of audio as a WAV file using Audacity 1.2.6 and it's perfect.

I suspect the problem is not that there is anything wrong with the WAV file, but that whatever media player it is being tested on requires longer files. Once it's in a sampler program it should be fine.

[ulrichburke]

I was just testing it using VLC, which I play everything on because it always seemed to play everything OK.

I'll have another go and try it in the drum machine and report back.

Sorry to be a nuisance like this, if it turns out to be something as dumbass as me not trying it out in the sampler!

Yours respectfully

ulrichburke

[steve]

I was just testing it using VLC

I also tested with VLC ...
VLC does not make any sound when you play really short files (wrong)
Tested with MPlayer, and the 0.007 second file plays a click (correct)