Editing clips...?

ORIGINAL: Rickenbacker

Man, if I could re-write the manual in layman's terms....

I'm trying to isolate (& get rid of) certain sections of clips. It'd be dead easy if I could see 2 "Now Time" lines on either side of what I don't want, then highlight-delete. I've looked over the editing audio chapter, but none of it sounded like what I needed to do.

Set the Now Time to the start of the section that you want to delete and right click. Select Split Track in the box that pops up. A second window will pop up - fill in the boxes for whatever you want. Now set the now time to the end of the section that you want to delete and repeat the above. You will now have a new clip containing the material you want to delete. Select the new clip and delete it.

When you play the track again, you may hear some pops or clicks where you split the track. To minimize or avoid the pops, you should split tracks where the wave form crosses the horizontal line in the track view. You may have to zoom in really close and turn off the snap to grid feature (little window pane looking box in the bottom right of the screen) to make an accurate split. I personally try splitting with the snap to grid feature on and see if the pops are there before I futz with this method.

Also, for the project I'm doing, I imported a couple of songs from my mp3 files, but I *think* they arrive in wav format(?) I wanna put the project on CD-R when I'm done, so will it be ok as is, or would I need to 1st convert it all to mp3 format?

They are actually not imported as .wav format. They are imported in a format that MC uses. When it comes time to export your completed song, you will be given an option as to which format you want to export to - .wav, .mp3, windows media, and maybe a few others. The highest quality will be a .wav file. The others are basically compressed .wav files so you lose some quality.

And lastly, I put a fade-in in one of the clips. (music/ sound fx) But what I want it to do is remian at a low enough volume so as to not drown out the vocal track. Would I just simply set the volume(s) beforehand?

Yes, the easiest way is to set the volume beforehand - especially if the volume won't change throughout the song. If you want the volume to change throughout the song, you can insert a volume envelope over the track and adjust the volume levels throughout the song with the envelope.