Just wanted to say thanks much for all of the suggestions and techniques, I really do appreciate it. I hope the one I found will be helpful to you as well!
 
- Craig

brundlefly

CraigG58
Unless I'm missing something, I've found an even simpler way to accomplish this.
 
I never noticed the "Mute" and "Erase" tools before. To mute:
 
- Enter track view.
- Press F10 to toggle Mute or Erase in the tools module (for my purposes, Mute).
- Starting in the lower half of the top track, left click and drag down to select the area you want to mute. When you release, mute displays small dots above each waveform to indicate where the muting begins and ends.
- That's it!

 
Given you felt putting an automation envleope on the Master bus was too much work, I didn't think you would want have to region-mute every clip individually. 
 
Personally I think either bus automation or splitting and clip-muting are easier and more easily undone/redone, but glad to hear you got it figured in any case.

 
It's not that I thought it was too much work, and I do use automation for various things quite a bit. Nothing had to be done individually, it was all in one shot using the three steps above, and took about 10 seconds. Hey, everything's easy when you know how to do it, right? 
 
In the case of what I needed to do today, it was just easier to use the tools I linked because it only needed to be done once for a very short period, across all tracks. Another instance I can see myself using these tools would be for short sections of tracks that might contain various instances of noise, for example microphone pops. For spot fixes like that, I think mute will be very convenient.
 
Anyway, for the purposes of what I was doing today, I think using automation envelopes would have been overkill. But, I will definitely keep the techniques you outlined in mind for future reference during other, more complex tasks.
 
Thanks again!

CraigG58
- Starting in the lower half of the top track, left click and drag down to select the area you want to mute.

Okay, you win.   It did not occur to me you could drag across multiple tracks with the mute tool. I've only ever used it to mute part of a single clip.
 
That is definitely a superior solution. Sorry for the unnecessary debate.

Hey, no need for apologies, and debate is a good thing. I know I learned something, never knew about "Offset Mode" before!

Dumb question, but why can't you route all your tracks to a bus called SubMaster (or whatever) that feeds Master?  Then you can automate the SubMaster without screwing up any automation moves on Master.
 
You could even rename Master to SubMaster and create a new master bus to minimize the number of track assignments. All you have to do is send SubMaster (which used to be Master) to the new master.
 
I just did that to verify it works.
 
(I find Offset very dangerous.  You can't tell which tracks are in Offset mode and things can get really screwed up.)

There is an exact way to do this. File menu/Process /Apply Effect/Remove Silence. Ta da... ;) lol
Hope this help! Have a nice day.

11Dreams
There is an exact way to do this. File menu/Process /Apply Effect/Remove Silence. Ta da... ;) lol
Hope this help! Have a nice day.

this is an amazing command (Remove Silence).
Now if I could just figure out how to use it properly. tweaking that thing takes practice.

CraigG58
Unless I'm missing something, I've found an even simpler way to accomplish this.
 
I never noticed the "Mute" and "Erase" tools before. To mute:
 
- Enter track view.
- Press F10 to toggle Mute or Erase in the tools module (for my purposes, Mute).
- Starting in the lower half of the top track, left click and drag down to select the area you want to mute. When you release, mute displays small dots above each waveform to indicate where the muting begins and ends.
- That's it!
 
Mute tool:
https://www.cakewalk.com/...amp;help=Tools.16.html
Erase tool:
https://www.cakewalk.com/...amp;help=Tools.15.html
 
P.S. Forgot to mention, erase is destructive, and mute is not. So, two nice choices there as well.

Oh hell yeah! Thanks for the tip - definitely have had situations where I could use either one of these ways.

11Dreams
There is an exact way to do this. File menu/Process /Apply Effect/Remove Silence. Ta da... ;) lol
Hope this help! Have a nice day.

That'll work if you want to remove something that's already 'silent', but OP didn't indicate that the part he wanted to silence was noise floor level.

brundlefly

11Dreams
There is an exact way to do this. File menu/Process /Apply Effect/Remove Silence. Ta da... ;) lol
Hope this help! Have a nice day.

That'll work if you want to remove something that's already 'silent', but OP didn't indicate that the part he wanted to silence was noise floor level.

Not really, I believe you can set the level of the db to take out below any db. I know I removed part of a vocal track once... oops... :)