Edit Menu: Remove Special

Items in the Remove Special cascading Edit menu remove audio or labels (or audio with labels if both are selected) by Split Cut and Split Delete. These removal methods do not affect the audio or labels to right of the selection.

You can also silence or trim audio only, not affecting labels.

You may hear a click at the edit points when you remove or paste audio. This can be caused by DC offset in the waveform or by poor selection of the edit points. See this Editing Frequently Asked Question for how to deal with this.

Split Cut CTRL + ALT + X

Same as Edit > Cut, but none of the audio data or labels to right of the selection are shifted. This is therefore a useful command to remove one label of a group of labels without affecting the other labels (be sure to select only in the label track unless you want to cut the audio as well as the label).

A gap is thus left behind in the audio track which splits the existing audio clip into two clips that can be moved independently using Time Shift Tool.

Split Delete CTRL + ALT + K

Removes the selected audio and/or labels without placing these on the Audacity clipboard, but like Split Cut does not shift the following audio or labels.

This is therefore a useful command to remove one label of a group of labels without affecting the other labels (be sure to select only in the label track unless you want to delete the audio as well as the label).

The labels following the deleted section do not move to the left. The labels still correspond to the same audio regions. This is a quick way to delete a label without affecting any other labels on the Label Track.

As with Split Cut the preceding and following audio are now separate clips that can be moved independently.

The following two commands affect the audio in the selection but do not affect any labels that are in the selection.

Silence Audio CTRL + L

Replaces the selected audio with silence.

Trim Audio CTRL + T

Removes all audio from the current clip except the selected part, creating its own clip from the remaining audio. If there are other separate clips in the same track these are not removed or shifted unless trimming the entire length of a clip or clips (note in the "After" image below that the audio in the clip to the right is unaffected).

Gale 31Aug14: If we're now making this page relate to the "Remove Special" submenu then the below examples don't make complete sense except for Split Delete. Perhaps these examples should be moved to Removing Labels - Examples, with the Split Delete text (above) linking to that page?

Peter 01Sep14: I moved the old example #3 on Split Delete up into the body of the text on this page (as it was the only H2 section without a direct inline graphic). I have left the remaining two examples here for now commented out. They seem to me to add little additional value to Removing Labels - Examples.
ToDo-2 Decision: do we move these two examples to Removing Labels - Examples or just delete them?

Peter 01Sep14: Commenting out these examples - as Gale points above they are no longer relevant to this page now that the Edit menu has been re-organized.