Audacity Forum

Hello experts,

Need your help. I have been making audios for a few weeks and I have a weird issue. If I take any audio, goto effect, and repeat, there is a gap that's created between the 2. I have done this 100 times and never seen a gap like this. This empty gap will not go away even if I delete or truncate. Please look at the attachment to see what I mean.

The gap interrupts the audio with a click sound. Even when I export it's still there.

Any idea how I can remove this empty gap?

Left mouse button click on the bold line on the right of that "gap".

Note that it's not really a gap. It's just a "split" separating two adjacent audio clips. Digital audio is just a series of discrete "sample" points. The line that joins the dots does not exist in the audio, that's just a graphical addition to help visualize the waveform. There's actually a "gap" between every sample point, but Audacity may show a line connecting them.

zainzain11 wrote: ↑

Fri Nov 27, 2020 9:23 am

The gap interrupts the audio with a click sound. Even when I export it's still there.

Clicks occur at loop points if the audio does not match up smoothly. For a transition to not click, both the amplitude (level) and the slope of the waveform must match up at the loop point:

Hey Steve,

Thanks for the reply. I understand exactly what you mean and it makes total sense. I have been doing editing like this (repeat and remove gaps and align sound perfectly).

But I do still hear a slight dud sound. I have attached the 3-sec audio. It is a slight dud, but it still bothers me. Again, I have made countless audios like this for my youtube channel, the first time I am seeing an empty gap and dud sound even if the audio is aligned perfectly.

zainzain11 wrote: ↑

Fri Nov 27, 2020 10:03 am

I am seeing an empty gap and dud sound even if the audio is aligned perfectly.

I can see the "thud" in the track spectrogram view.

That tells me that the two parts almost join up perfectly (but not quite perfect).

Wow! I didn't even know what a spectrogram view is.

Thanks so much! At least I know the issue and learned about spectrogram view.

God bless!!!

zainzain11 wrote: ↑

Fri Nov 27, 2020 9:23 am

Any idea how I can remove this empty gap?

You can remove the empty gap by selecting the time-shift tool, then clicking and dragging the waveform on the right until it joins up with that on the left.

zainzain11 wrote: ↑

Fri Nov 27, 2020 10:03 am

But I do still hear a slight dud sound. I have attached the 3-sec audio. It is a slight dud, but it still bothers me.

Since your clip is fairly periodic, as an exercise, I tried taking your audio, duplicating to a new track, time-shifting it to find a section that roughly corresponds with the original, but without the thud. Then, I split the original at the thud, and right-shifted so that it aligned to time-shifted duplicate. See here:
Then I did a manual cross-fade: I selected the area of interest, marked it with Ctrl_B, then silenced all other audio in the duplicated track. I then performed Effects > Fade In, then Fade Out on the duplicated track, and did the converse on the original track: Then a Tracks > Mix > Mix And Render yields this result:
Thanks to steve for providing the spectrogram editing inspiration.