Ableton Forum

i presume this is a stupid question, but as im very new to the program, im gonna ask it anyway... how do i edit audio using live?

That's a very broad question, can you expand on it a little? what do you want to do?

I assume the posted means "can I edit audio desctructively?"

and the answer is... not in Live, not so much. You can launch an audio editor from inside Live, or you can add VSTs to a track and render/freeze/resample that audio... but there is no way to directly apply a VST effect to audio the way you would in Pro Tools or Cubase or older programs.

It's not very hard - you just freeze it and flatten it

I also don't understand why you can't edit audio -

I'm sure that there are many programs with fancier editing features, but you can certainly do the basics - cut, rearrange, crop, normalize, etc.

And create a new file from your efforts, easily.

thanks, i realise the question was broad. its destructive editing of material recorded by me that i m after primarily (as in pro tools)

can you suggest a decent audio editor thats compatible and preferably not expensive?

also, even the basic cut, crop etc features are eluding me at the moment...

You can trim and ummm.... well trim. Everything you need to use clip envelopes and then render the audio and reimport into Live.

I'm still not buying it

with crop, split, copy, paste, delete, duplicate, insert, freeze, flatten and consolidate commands, what is it exactly that you can't do in Live??

Again, I understand that there are probably lots more fancy features in other progs, but you certainly can do more than crop!

hello nicky-bass,

you can crop a clip (delete everything outside the start/end-markers) by rightclicking into the clip view's waveform-window.

In the arrange-view you can do all types of editing non-destructively. By consolidating Live will render a new file out of your edits.

Note that cropping and consolidating is actually adding files to your project. (Unless you clean up the project by deleting unused files later, that is ...)

Also note that consolidating also normalizes your audio file too.

eh.. I don't think it does...

I guarantee it does, been discussed here many times.