Make selections for audio editing
Learn how to make selections using the Time Selection, Marquee Selection, and Lasso Selection tools in Audition to edit audio precisely and add effects.
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Making precise selections in Adobe Audition is an important part of your work.
You need to be able to selectively apply special effects, remove parts of your audio, and so on.
Let's just take a little look at how to make selections in the Waveform Editor.
I'm just going to go into my Media under my Sessions folder, and let's have a look in the "Working with sound" folder on that drive in my Media Browser.
And I'm going to double-click to open up this Interview-Noise_audio.wav.
Now what's interesting about this is we've got our waveform and that's okay.
But if we look in the Spectral Display, we've got some interesting bits of mechanical noise.
These are sounds that we're going to want to work with and clean up and remove.
Just so you can have a little listen, I'll click and play this back.
You can hear there's a telephone ringing in the background.
So this is something we might want to work with in post.
So first of all, if I just pull down to our Waveform Display and just move the Heads-Up display a little bit, you'll notice along the top here, I have a series of tools.
And only the tools that are usable in a particular display are going to be accessible.
You'll notice that some of these are grayed out.
And that's because they're for using in the Multitrack Display.
Right now what I'm particularly interested in is these 3: the Time Selection Tool, the Marquee Selection Tool, and the Lasso Selection Tool.
So first of all, let's take this I-beam Time Selection Tool.
And you can see I can just drag across and make a time selection.
Pretty straightforward.
You can only ever have one.
You don't need to move it.
Wherever you click that's what you're going to select.
Notice that if I select a little part of this, the playhead is automatically lined up at the beginning of the selection.
So if I press play, I'm just going to get that selection.
Pretty short.
Notice as well that when I make that selection, automatically in the Spectral Display.
I'm getting a top-to-bottom, every frequency marquee selection.
I'm getting a box over all of the frequencies for that duration.
I can also click inside the Spectral Display.
I'm going to have exactly the same effect with this tool.
If I go to the Marquee Tool though, I can now click and drag particular frequencies within the Spectral Display.
So here for example, it's pretty dinky but I can click and drag over that telephone ring.
And now I can do things like reduce the volume if I wanted to, or apply some noise reduction effects.
If I try to use this tool in the waveform, you'll see that it switches to that I-beam.
So automatically, Audition is giving me the correct tool.
And lastly if I go to this Lasso or Lasso Tool, I can click and drag and make any shape I like inside the Spectral Display.
And now that I've done that, I've got a region of interest if you like, within which I can, again - I can do things like apply effects.
If you've ever used Adobe Photoshop, you should be familiar with this kind of selection process, often referred to as a mask in Photoshop.
Notice that if I click on the area that I've selected and drag and move this selection to other parts of my Special Frequency Display, notice as I move towards the top, this seems to shrink.
As I move towards the bottom, it expands.
That's because if you look at the scale on the far right side of this display, it's not a linear scale.
It's a logarithmic scale.
You can see the distance between 1K and 4K is bigger than the distance between 6K and 10K, even though it's the same number of frequencies.
So we're getting this logarithmic curved display, and my selection is updating automatically to reflect that.
It's a linear selection.
It's a specific range of frequencies and those frequencies are reflected correctly within the Spectral Display.
One other little thing here is if you double-click, Audition will automatically select the entire audio file.
But if I zoom in a little bit, which I can do down here with my zoom controls, and then let me go to my I-beam, deselect, double-click and then zoom out again.
So here, I'm zooming out.
You can see what I'm actually selecting is not the entire audio clip, but the visible part of the audio clip.
So using the zoom controls, you can specify the region that you're going to select, zoom out and then work with that region within the context of the full duration of the file.
So that's how to make selections in Audition.
It's a very important part of the work you're going to do so I recommend you take a little bit of time, to get comfortable with these 3 tools.
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