Please, I'm creating a presentation and I need to cut coughs, slurps and silence out of a sound track. (I have no video yet, that comes later.) I can preview and see the bits I want to cut. The process for cutting seems awfully long-winded. Here's what I'm doing:

• Press X to go into razor mode
• Click on the start
• Click on the end
• Press S for select mode
• Click on the part to be cut
• Press <delete>
• Right-click on the space created
• Choose "remove space"

Please can anyone tell me a simpler way to do this because it feels awkward when I'm doing it multiple times.

andycivil wrote:... a simpler way ...

The simplest way? No idea. Simpler? Maybe.

When I had to do something like this, I loaded the audio file into audacity. Seems like it might have been half the steps you listed, but I might be misremembering.

Jep. In audacity I mark the the audio parts I want to reuse, cut them out with control plus x, and put them into a new file (control plus v).
If I remember right, i did this with kwave nearly the same way.

Thanks, both for the answers. It does seem sad that switching to Audacity is the best way to use Kdenlive, but it is what it is! At least, with FOSS it doesn't matter how little the task is, the program (Audacity) is still great 'value'.

I was thinking about this (and why Audacity works better) and it's because in Audacity you can select a piece of timeline and delete it. The way Kdenlive works is logical, because if you selected part of a track and deletion moved the whole rest of the track in time, then other things that you'd got to line up nicely, suddenly wouldn't (including grouped A/V tracks). So deleting a selected piece of a clip really has to leave silence there. (Anyone see the movie "Contact"? LOL).

So, a feature that Kdenlive really should have, is that you can select a chunk of timeline (with the mouse) and hitting the 'delete' key would delete that piece of time from ALL tracks. That would help me here, and it would be logical, too. One (compound) mouse operation plus one key, would be far simpler than what I'm finding.

andycivil wrote:Thanks, both for the answers. It does seem sad that switching to Audacity is the best way to use Kdenlive, but it is what it is! At least, with FOSS it doesn't matter how little the task is, the program (Audacity) is still great 'value'.

I was thinking about this (and why Audacity works better) and it's because in Audacity you can select a piece of timeline and delete it. The way Kdenlive works is logical, because if you selected part of a track and deletion moved the whole rest of the track in time, then other things that you'd got to line up nicely, suddenly wouldn't (including grouped A/V tracks). So deleting a selected piece of a clip really has to leave silence there. (Anyone see the movie "Contact"? LOL).

So, a feature that Kdenlive really should have, is that you can select a chunk of timeline (with the mouse) and hitting the 'delete' key would delete that piece of time from ALL tracks. That would help me here, and it would be logical, too. One (compound) mouse operation plus one key, would be far simpler than what I'm finding.

If I understand what you are referring to, it would work something like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWwfQkS_X58

When you select in and out points, if you do a ripple delete, it applies to all tracks in the timeline, and shifts everything over. I used Screenflow for making webcasts and screencasts for years. I'm used to it's workflow, but not against learning a new workflow. RIPPLE DELETE WAS MY BEST FRIEND. There's probably a way to do it but I haven't discovered it yet.

For me, I'd record my screen and narrate at the same time. Then I'd edit out audio glitches and errors, but using ripple delete it cut parts of the video too, as long as I wasn't doing something on the screen, I was fine. If I didn't want to cut the video, I'd just cut that part of the audio out.

I'm certain all these tools exist in Kdenlive, but I haven't reproduced a good workflow yet.

For me, it's all about screencasting, not the workflows needed for say a regular video project, one where you bring in lots of video clips and b roll footage. I typically have one video track, my screen, an audio track of my narration, possibly a second audio track I add at the very end of quiet background music, and various titles and call outs to point out things I'm doing onscreen. So far I find Kdenlive super powerful, but I haven't figured out how to edit my screencasts in an efficient manner yet.

I set up keyboard shortcuts to make this process much quicker:

I play my video in the editor, then:
SPACE to pause where I want to make a cut
(LEFT and RIGHT (arrow buttons) to adjust the position a bit, CTRL+L/R to make bigger jumps)
R to make the first cut
SPACE to play forward
SPACE again to stop
(CTRL+) L/R again to adjust position
R to make the second cut
L to move back over the section I want to cut
+ to select that section
DELETE to cut the section
CTRL+DELETE to delete space to "remove space" on that track, or CTRL+SHIFT+DELETE to "remove space on all tracks"

That looks like a long list written down, but I do this so often (cutting silences etc from a screencast) that I bang through it in under a second for each cut.

That said, I'm realising that an "auto detect silence" feature would save me a lot of work - it exists in Audacity for audio but I don't think I could use this to cut video, goooooogling I just found Olive 0.2 has this feature, I may give this a try for my next video - cut the silence in Olive then do my editing in Kdenlive.
Tutorial for cutting silence automatically in Olive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GswOU8g-Ekw