Your First Edit

This walkthrough makes a complete source-destination edit. You need a project with some recorded material on one or more tracks: a take of a piece, and a second take of the same passage you would like to patch in. Anything will do for practice, even two copies of a short recording laid end to end.

First, make sure the actions are easy to reach. Bind keyboard shortcuts to at least the four marker actions and S-D Edit (see Keyboard Shortcuts for suggestions). You can run everything from the Action List while you learn, but you will want keys very quickly.

The four steps

  1. Mark where the new material should go (destination). Put the edit cursor where the bad passage starts and run Add Destination IN marker. Move to where it ends and run Add Destination OUT Marker.
  2. Mark the good material you want to use (source). Put the cursor at the start of the good take and run Add Source IN marker. Move to the end and run Add Source OUT marker.
  3. Make the edit. Run S-D Edit. ReaEdit copies the material between the source markers, replaces the destination passage with it, closes up the gap and puts a short crossfade at each join.
  4. Listen. Play across both joins. If the edit is not right, undo it (one undo step) and adjust your markers.

The markers are coloured so you can tell them apart at a glance: destination markers are cyan, source markers are green.

What just happened

  • Every track was edited together. ReaEdit treats the tracks of a project as parallel channels of one recording, as you would have with several microphones, so the source passage came from all of them and went in on all of them.
  • The four markers you placed are still there, so you can see exactly what was done. Placing a new marker of the same kind replaces the old one; see Markers.
  • The crossfade length came from your preferences (35 ms to start with).

Next

  • You do not always need all four markers: see Edit Types for 2- and 3-point edits, assembly-line editing and time-stretched edits.
  • To remove a passage rather than replace it, see Deleting.