Edit audio on the timeline using the waveform

Every audio clip in DepCut is a green bar with a white waveform drawn inside it. The waveform is the quickest way to see what a sound is doing: where the speech starts, where a music hit lands, where a recording goes quiet. Once you can read it, most audio edits become drags and clicks.

Read the bar

• Tall shapes are loud moments and thin lines are quiet ones.
• A flat stretch is silence, which makes it a good place to cut.
• Dark ramps at the left or right edge are fades.
• The clip's name sits at the top of the bar.

Place your edits against what you see, then confirm by ear.

Move, trim and change speed

1. Drag a bar left or right to move it in time.
2. Drag the left or right edge of the bar to trim the start or the end.
3. For an exact start time, select the bar, open the Move tab and type a value into Starts at.
4. Open the Trim tab for the Trim start and Trim end controls.
5. Open the Speed tab to play the sound faster or slower. It keeps its pitch, so a voice does not turn high or deep, and the bar changes length to match.

While you drag, the bar snaps to the start of the timeline, the cuts between video clips, the end of the project, the playhead and the edges of other clips. A guide line shows what it caught. Put the playhead on the frame a sound should hit, then drag the bar toward it and let it settle.

Split a sound

1. Select the audio bar.
2. Put the playhead where you want the cut.
3. Press Split in the right panel, or use ⌘B or S.

With an audio bar selected, Split slices that bar. With a video clip selected, it slices the clip under the playhead. With the keyboard shortcut, a pointer resting over the timeline sets the cut point. Otherwise the cut lands at the playhead.

To remove a piece, split on both sides, select the piece in the middle and press Delete. An audio bar stays where you leave it, so the gap remains until you drag a later piece back.

Separate sound from picture

A video clip carries its own sound. Two tools pull it out.

• Detach audio is in the clip's Clip options menu, the three dots on its bar. The sound moves to a soundtrack bar, trimmed and paced like the clip, and the video clip is muted.
• Extract is a tab in the right panel for a selected video clip. Press Extract beside Extract audio and DepCut saves the clip's sound as a new audio file and places it at the start of the clip. The clip keeps its own sound, so switch on Mute audio in its Volume tab if you do not want to hear it twice.

Use more than one track

Drag a bar onto the empty space below the last audio row to open a new audio track. Empty tracks disappear on their own.

Keep voice, music and effects on separate tracks so the mix is easy to read. Each track has a speaker icon in the left gutter. Press it to Mute track, and press it again to Unmute track. That lets you hear the voice alone.

To silence a single bar, open its Clip options menu and choose Mute clip. It stays on the timeline, grayed out, until you choose Unmute clip.

A soundtrack that runs past your last video clip lengthens the project and the export. Trim music and effects so they end with the picture, unless you want the sound to play on after it.

Next step

Open DepCut, add a clip with speech, choose Detach audio, and split the sound at a pause. Watch how the waveform makes the quiet moments easy to find.