Advanced editing tools

Digital Performer is packed with state-of-the-art audio and MIDI editing technologies. Careful attention has been paid to designing transparency and consistency across all data types, so that you can seamlessly edit audio and MIDI data, even together at the same time, using many of the same tools and gestures.

Here are just a few highlights of Digital Performer's many advanced editing features.

Four new editing tools

The Digital Performer tool bar contains four audio editing tools to speed up your edits: Trim, Slip, Slide and Roll.

Trim

Trim lets you drag the edge of an audio region. This feature was available in earlier versions of DP, but now it can be explicitly invoked with the new tool in the tool bar. This allows you to trim audio regions more quickly by clicking somewhere inside the audio region, rather than having to find and drag the edge, which may be offscreen.

Slip

The Slip tool allows you to move the waveform inside an audio clip earlier or later without affecting the left or right edge of the audio region.

Slide

The Slide tool does the opposite of Slip: it allows you to move the edges of the audio region earlier or later by the same amount in one drag operation while the audio inside the clip remains anchored to its current position in time.

Roll

The Roll tool allows you to drag the border between two adjacent audio regions in one operation, "covering up" a portion of one region while "uncovering" the other.

Real-time crossfades

Digital Performer provides powerful and fast crossfade editing for audio regions, with a variety of fade types, including equal gain, equal power and custom fade curves. Fades and crossfades can be applied to mono, stereo and n-channel audio regions, and they can be applied across multiple audio regions simultaneously in a single operation.

In DP Version 7, fades and crossfades are calculated in real time, during editing, for smooth and seamless editing. No additional files are created on disk. Projects created in earlier versions are automatically converted to real-time fades and crossfades, and any fade files on disk are deleted.

Smooth Audio Edits

This invaluable tool can save hours of tedious editing.

Audio edits that you make often produce gaps between soundbites. This is especially true when editing dialog, or splitting soundbites into small slices using Digital Performer's beat editing features. These gaps of silence can be audible and usually sound unnatural. The Smooth Audio Edits feature can save hours of tedious editing by automatically filling gaps with "room tone" to mask them, complete with automated crossfades for 100% seamless transitions. You can create your own room tone or have Digital Performer find room tone for you in the original audio files so that it exactly matches the natural silences in the audio.