How to Re-Time Music With Adobe Audition
One task every video editor has to deal with when working with stock music is cutting the track to fit the length of the sequence. That usually involves several steps:
listening to the music, making notes of where the downbeats are, where the bridge is, where the meter changes, etc.
marking in and out points and then lifting sections out of the audio track
blending the remaining sections together with cross dissolves
listening to the spliced track for any obvious jumps in the music
repeating the above steps if the cuts don't work or if the run time of the video changes
Obviously this is time consuming, but Adobe has automated the process with the Remix feature inside of Adobe Audition. Here's how you do it:
Open Audition and then import a music track.
Go to File>New>Multitrack Session.
Drop the music bed onto an audio track (see below). Notice that the music is roughly 2:45 in length.
Next, right click on the music track and scroll down to Remix>Enable Remix. Once turned on, Audition will analyze the entire piece of music. This only takes a few seconds.
After the analysis is complete, the icon in the far right corner of the music track will change from a small triangle to a small squiggly line, indicating that Remix is now active (see below).
Notice the small squiggle in the top right corner of the music track.
Now, when you hover over that small squiggle in the top right corner, your mouse cursor displays a small stopwatch.
When the stopwatch appears, you can click and drag the clip to shorten the entire piece of music down to your liking. Let's say we need to cut this piece of music from a 2 minute 45 second run time down to 2 minutes. After you finish trimming the clip, Audition will make all the splices for you. Notice that vertical squiggly lines now appear in your track, indicating where Audition has made cuts (see below).
Notice the single, vertical squiggly line around the :40 mark.
In the example above, Audition only needed to make one cut, and it's around the :40 mark. But you will now see that the length of my music track has been cut from the original 2:45 run time down to the 2 minute mark and it didn't require any manual cutting and splicing.
Now the only thing left to do is to select the track by right clicking and then selecting Export Mixdown. In the dialog box that pops up, you can set the bit rate and sample rate and then set the file destination.
And that's it! Audition makes it easy to trim music down to fit the length of your sequence. And if the overall run time changes during the approval process, don't worry. Simply go back into Audition, select the far right corner of your music track, and drag it around to make it shorter or longer. Audition will handle the splicing for you.
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