^^^ Best answer.
 
Sadly, a big part of the explanation is also that modern pop productions are increasingly assembled Lego-style by cutting and pasting the same clip over and over, often a canned loop.

After recording, I usually tweak the timing of individual phrases. Split clips with blank spaces between are an inevitable consequence of this.
 

I have noticed this with PT tutorials as well. I always wondered because it seems to be that the clips are split into musical phrases, rather than just chunks of the song like "chorus" etc. I could understand if the phrases had been punched in one at a time, but I'm guessing it's more likely that the parts were recorded in full and then split into phrases manually. I was watching one with a wah-wah guitar part split into phrases and I thought there's no way they were punched in separately.

I'm not sure I buy the disc saving explanation, seems like a pretty weak effort/reward trade off. Personally I've always wondered if some people just like to have their set out as split clips so that they have an instant overview of which instruments are playing when. If every track is one long clip, this is harder to see at a glance.

Did you notice if any of the clips were from VSTi's? If so then that would be significant since you know they would have bounced to one long clip and then split it manually. Unless of course they bounced little sections at a time with different synth settings to save having to automate it (I do that myself sometimes).

sharke
...I'm not sure I buy the disc saving explanation...

 
I agree. It won't save anything if the WAV file corresponding to the original large clip is still in the Audio folder.

Kev999

sharke
...I'm not sure I buy the disc saving explanation...

 
I agree. It won't save anything if the WAV file corresponding to the original large clip is still in the Audio folder.

When I'm done with the tracking side of the project, I "save as" to another location. I have always been under the impression that this copies only the audio that is actually used in the project and discards the rest. Are you saying that this is incorrect ?
 

When you bounce a clip, SONAR creates a new audio file, so the old one is "released" and no longer required by the project. AFAIK, if you slip-edit a wave file to a small clip, the save as is going to copy the entire wave file (not the clip window). This is something easy to check though, simply expand a clip edge and see if there is audio data behind it.
 
The only way to create a new file is bounce it. Again, if they are bounced together you get silence between them; the only way to make them "smaller" is to bounce each individual clip.

mettelus
When you bounce a clip, SONAR creates a new audio file, so the old one is "released" and no longer required by the project. AFAIK, if you slip-edit a wave file to a small clip, the save as is going to copy the entire wave file (not the clip window). This is something easy to check though, simply expand a clip edge and see if there is audio data behind it.
 
The only way to create a new file is bounce it. Again, if they are bounced together you get silence between them; the only way to make them "smaller" is to bounce each individual clip.

I thought that checking the "split clips" box in the Remove Silence dialogue took care of this ?

I have never used that function so not sure. Unless a bounce is involved, I suspect it just makes the clips (windows) discreet, but the underlying wave file is unaltered. Easy to verify though, just look in the project audio folder when doing.

One wave file per track is not "bad" as it eliminates the need for broadcast info of each one, and audio isn't destroyed outside the clip boundaries. With today's processing power, it is actually rather minor and more preference (nothing more).

Whoa! This is getting far too complex for my meagre brain.
 

mettelus
I have never used that function so not sure. Unless a bounce is involved, I suspect it just makes the clips (windows) discreet, but the underlying wave file is unaltered. Easy to verify though, just look in the project audio folder when doing.

One wave file per track is not "bad" as it eliminates the need for broadcast info of each one, and audio isn't destroyed outside the clip boundaries. With today's processing power, it is actually rather minor and more preference (nothing more).

 
Yeah, I'm not saying it's "bad" to not do it, just that there is a benefit IMHO visually speaking with the added bonus of cleaning up the audio that's going to live on my HDD. On the occasions where I need to send any tracks to someone else for a collab project, which is not all that often in my case, then it's easy enough to "bounce to track" to restore the full track  so that it's easy for the recipient to line up.
 
Anyway, some guy called Craig Anderton (whoever that is) seems to think it is worthwhile.....
 
 
"At first glance, this might just seem to be a noise gate, and noise gating is one thing Remove Silence can do, but it can also save space on your hard drive. This is because Sonar won't store periods of silence within a track as audio if you tell it what you mean by 'silence'. The Remove Silence function can also physically remove the parts of a clip that contain silence, leaving a series of isolated clips.
 
Removing silence can recover quite a bit of space in the case of vocals, where you record a take from the beginning of the song to the end, but there are lots of long, silent spaces during the take. Just be conservative with your settings (low Open and Close values, a couple of hundred milliseconds of Hold time, no Attack, 12ms or so of Lookahead time and about 250ms of Decay), so you don't remove wanted material. And if you do wholesale silence removal on tracks, make sure you're happy with the result before it's too late to Undo."
 
from http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jun06/articles/sonartech_0606.htm