AV News 200 - May 2015
Listening
Even more important than viewing is listening. Although you have added
some audio files, you will not be able to play them until there are also some
slides in the project. Therefore add two slides, one at the beginning and one
at the end of, or beyond, the rightmost audio clip. You will not be able to do
this if the timeline is in full-screen mode.
Once this has been done, click in the timeline to position the redline cursor
to a particular time, then press the space bar to start playing and again to
stop.
Multi-track mixing
After adding slides as described above, play from roughly the beginning of
the timeline. If you have followed the instructions above regarding adding
files you should have two audio clips one above the other in different tracks.
When you play in this area you should hear a mix of both tracks, as you
expect from a multi-track mixer.
When making adjustments this mixing can make it difficult to hear the track
you are working on. To overcome this, other tracks can be muted by right
clicking them and selecting 'Mute Track'. An icon appears at the top right of
the corresponding track area to indicate this.
Moving audio clips
Change to full screen timeline view (F4) then zoom out and use the scroll
bar until you can see the whole of the audio clip in Track 2.
Position the mouse in the waveform and drag to the right and you will
adjust the position of the audio clip within the track. Dragging up or down
moves the audio clip to a different track. Note you cannot have an empty
track so, for instance, you cannot drag a clip down from Track 2 to Track 3 if
this would leave Track 2 empty.
Rather than going through Project Options as we did, you can also use
dragging to add audio files. Simply make sure you are in normal timeline view
and the file window is showing the audio files as shown in Figure 5. Then
drag a file down into the track area which is initially identified by the caption
'Add audio files from a file list above'. Tracks will be created automatically to
contain the files.
Removing clips and tracks
When viewing the timeline, remove an audio clip by right clicking a waveform
and selecting the option 'Remove Audio Clip'. The audio file itself is
unaffected. Another option 'Remove Track' removes the track and all audio
clips in it.
From the Audio Tab of Project Options you can remove clips and tracks by
selecting either an audio file name or track name and clicking the red-cross
icon followed by the OK button to close Project Options.
Trimming audio clips
To adjust the length of an audio clip, drag one or both ends. The original
audio file is unaffected. PTE simply ignores the sections that are not included
in the waveform.
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