Contract/expand silence in your piano accompaniment track.

One of the most common problems with our accompaniment tracks is that the pause during a cadenza is not as you expect it to be. In effect, in a cadenza, especially the final one, a singer feels free to sing without tempo, so the silence in our track could be very different than you expect.

However, there is an easy way to solve this problem, all you need is a program of audio editing, such as Audacity, remember only that after editing your accompaniment track you will loose synchronization with the karaoke track and the other audio tracks, and for this reason it's necessasry to work with a copy of the original file.

First of all, launch Audacity and, from the Menu "Project", select "Import Audio" and find the path in wich your audio tracks are stored; in our case we select the piano accompaniment track we want to change (for example "donnamobile.mp3"). Press the "Open" button; now the track is imported to your project.

We have to find in which region of our audio track there is the cadenza we want to expand/contract, in our case it's at the end of the aria (look at the red arrow in the above picture). Make sure that the "Selection tool" () is selected and click the left mouse button in the space of silence. Now the cursor is in the right place. Enlarge, if it's necessary, the area of the cadenza (use the "Zoom Tool" and hold down the left mouse button over the area you want to enlarge). Now your screen should appear like this:

It's time to insert or remove the silence from your track. Use the "Selection Tool" and make a selection in the silence area of the length that is necessary (for example, if you want to expand/contract your cadenza by 1.5 seconds, you have to select 1.5 seconds of the track). The length of the selection is written at the bottom left of the Audacity window. Your window should appear as shown below:

Now, if you want to expand the length of the pause, from the menu "Generate", select "Silence". A portion of silence of th length of your selection is added in your track. If you want to contract the pause, simply press "backspace" on your keyboard and the selection will be erased. if you are not satisfied with the result of the operation, select, from the "Edit" menu "Undo Silence/Undo Delete" and the previous situation will be restored. You can repeat this operation as many times as you want until you are satisfied of the result.

Now we have to save our new track, go to the "File" menu and select "Export as WAV" ("Export as MP3" is good too), in the next window change the name of the file (for example "Donnamobile_edited") and select "Save". Please don't overwrite the original piano accompaniment track!

If you have any doubt or question you can Contact us at any time.