Ableton Forum

When you freeze a track and then flatten it, you get also all silences rendered in the audio as well.. is there a trick to avoid this?

https://soundcloud.com/bob-billy

(1) Cut the clip where the silences begin / end, delete the silent bits, consolidate the remaining clips
(2) Freeze in session view
(3) ... or don't worry about it. I don't think it adds all that much to the file size. But I stand to be corrected.

@re:dream
option 1 is what I'm doing now, but it can become tedious when you have a couple of bars every 30 seconds or so.
Even though it does adds memory it is not my main concern, I just do not like to see clip fragments ..where is 'nothing'

bobbilly wrote:When you freeze a track and then flatten it, you get also all silences rendered in the audio as well.. is there a trick to avoid this?

Editing.

You're not the first to make this request:
How do I Strip Silence in Arrangement View? from 2013.

That is a different question. There the question is how to stripe silence.. that is just possible, here the question is, how to 'avoid' silence when flatten a track.

bobbilly wrote:That is a different question. There the question is how to stripe silence.. that is just possible, here the question is, how to 'avoid' silence when flatten a track.

OK. The end result will be the same obviously so I found it fitting. But avoiding means you're one step ahead of course.

bobbilly wrote:When you freeze a track and then flatten it, you get also all silences rendered in the audio as well.. is there a trick to avoid this?

Well, if you don't record the silence to start with there will be no silence rendered.

When you record from Session Live doesn't make a clip in Arrangement that isn't playing during record. If there isn't a clip on the time line there will be no audio with silence there. I never encounter this issue unless I'm overdubbing in Arrangement. Is that where you get into this? You can use the same approach there and go out of recording for the parts where you only have silence.

Please clarify how you work so we can understand how this becomes a problem for you.

Well, for example if you are in session view and have several clips spread over a track (could a soft synth with midi clips, or just samples) and whenever you decide to freeze the track it will render 1 audio file over the length of the song. So there are large silences in such a track which do consume memory and I'm always ending up cutting them out..

bobbilly wrote:Well, for example if you are in session view and have several clips spread over a track (could a soft synth with midi clips, or just samples) and whenever you decide to freeze the track it will render 1 audio file over the length of the song. So there are large silences in such a track which do consume memory and I'm always ending up cutting them out..

That does not happen here. Could it be new in 9.2? I'm using both the 9.2beta and 9.1.7 currently. I don't remember this, but then I don't flatten that often.

re:dream wrote: (3) ... or don't worry about it. I don't think it adds all that much to the file size. But I stand to be corrected.

I could be wrong but my understanding has always been that dumb, uncompressed audio formats like WAVE or AIFF have a certain bit depth and sample rate no matter what the actual content is.
Therefore 30 seconds of silence *should* use up the same amount of space as 30 seconds of Death Waltz.

bobbilly wrote:Well, for example if you are in session view and have several clips spread over a track (could a soft synth with midi clips, or just samples) and whenever you decide to freeze the track it will render 1 audio file over the length of the song. So there are large silences in such a track which do consume memory and I'm always ending up cutting them out..

You simply must be doing something I don't.

This is my quickly whipped up test song frozen in Live 9.1.7:


This is the same arrangement flattened:


You see those empty sections? There's no audio there. Something is missing from your account on what you do to find yourself in this problem. Please elaborate.

I believe that you will see when you look at the waveform that all of the clips in a flattened track reference a single audio file that stretches from the beginning of the 1st to the end of the last clip - including silence for all the time within that range where there were no clips. Is this not the case?

Stromkraft wrote:

bobbilly wrote:Well, for example if you are in session view and have several clips spread over a track (could a soft synth with midi clips, or just samples) and whenever you decide to freeze the track it will render 1 audio file over the length of the song. So there are large silences in such a track which do consume memory and I'm always ending up cutting them out..

You simply must be doing something I don't.

This is my quickly whipped up test song frozen in Live 9.1.7:


This is the same arrangement flattened:


You see those empty sections? There's no audio there. Something is missing from your account on what you do to find yourself in this problem. Please elaborate.

soundsliketree wrote:I believe that you will see when you look at the waveform that all of the clips in a flattened track reference a single audio file that stretches from the beginning of the 1st to the end of the last clip - including silence for all the time within that range where there were no clips. Is this not the case?

What you can do is to automatically strip out silent audio parts from this flattened file with some tool and re-add the resulting clips.
Another alternative would be to forgo flattening and record these tracks as audio in another track. I like flattening so I'd probably work directly on the clips and crop the sample, which moves it to its own file, which can be added wherever. Granted it would be nice if Live could do this automatically.

Why not suggest to Ableton to make something like this a built-in feature? I think it would be great.

soundsliketree wrote:I believe that you will see when you look at the waveform that all of the clips in a flattened track reference a single audio file that stretches from the beginning of the 1st to the end of the last clip - including silence for all the time within that range where there were no clips. Is this not the case?

Actually, you're right. Probably this is because of compatibility with other systems. But then this is how Live works currently. To fix this you'd have to strip the silence. Which is probably no worth the effort. It could be I guess depending on your circumstances.