Adjusting Start Times and End Times

Sometimes an audio file has extra content that you don’t want to be played. Or maybe a sound effect has silence at the beginning so when you hit GO, it takes a couple of seconds to actually play the sound.

You could open the original audio file in an audio editor, save your changes, and you’ll be ready to go, but QLab also gives you the tools to make some of these simple adjustments.

If you select an audio cue and open the Time & Loops tab in the Inspector, you’ll see the Start time and End time parameters. These can be adjusted by changing the value in the text box or by dragging the start and end points in the wave form. Here, for example, we have extra silence at the beginning of a cue. Hitting GO you can see this unneeded delay in the sound effect just plays. Pulling in the start time will get rid of that silence.

Or here’s an example of an audio file that contains several different thunder sound effects. I can keep the audio file intact, and simply adjust the start and end times to play only one of these thunders at a time one audio file multiple cues.