So, I now know how to import the audio-only from a source DVD. (I recorded some music from my satellite TV radio station onto a DVD with my set-top DVD recorder.) These tracks are called "chapters" on the source DVD, which breaks up the music into about seven-minute chapters. These are now seven-minute audio tracks. Now I want to combine several tracks together into one long 30-minute track, to reduce the number of eventual tracks I will have on my final audio-only DVD.

However, aftering joining four sample audio tracks together using the Sound Editor, I've noticed that there is a barely perceptible "edit" at each of the three joints of these four joined chapters/tracks that is not there when listening to the original source DVD--as if the tracks are not quite "married" together perfectly. Is there any "quick fix" to this, or do I need to break out my new Sonar audio editing software and tweak it as much as I can by hand, if possible?

What is the "perceptible edit"?

I can hear just a slight non-synchronization at the spot where the two clips join, like there is a millisecond-long or so gap. Not silence, but like when you splice two magnetic audio tape clips together. Something like that.

Not sure you can get rid of it, but you can try to delete that small portion by zooming in in Sound Editor to get to it. It's worth a shot.

Have you tried joining clips? This is done in the waveform display at the bottom. Try clicking on the first clip's waveform. Then position the slider to show the second clip. Hold down <Ctrl> and click on the second clip. Under the EDIT menu, select JOIN CLIPS.

Yes, and once they are joined, that's where I hear the edit: the point at where they are joined.

Now for a new problem. I was going along nicely, otherwise. I was importing audio "chapters" from my source DVD. I created a nice longer clip by combing a number of these audio chapters. Then I decided to tweak it a bit, and start from scratch. However, this time when I imported, say, Chapters 14-20 from the source DVD, they were not actually those numbered chapters, and no longer in the chronological order they are on the source DVD. These chapters, now known as "clips" in the Sound Editor, are now all shuffled. Frustrating!

Well, I found the remedy myself, after hunting high and low thru all the options. Go to TOOLS-Track Detection. Select "Detect Tracks." Then set "silence between tracks" from whatever it is (mine was 0.1) to 0.0. Tah dah!

OK. Something else you can try is to overlap the clips slightly. To do this put all of your clips back to back. Now create a second layer (plus icon under the Layer 1 title). Now drag alternate clips down to the second layer. Zoom way in (until each vertical marker is 0.01 seconds) and then overlap clips by a very small amount at the being / end of each clip.

Regarding importing the chapters, are they named? It seems like I had a problem like this with some multiple video imports and it put them in alphabetical order instead of the order I selected them.

They are named simply Chapter1 thru Chapter 60 on the source DVD. Then, once they are imported, SE automatically names it Clip 1 to whatever. I've done a restart of my PC, etc. I think it may be back to "normal" now. We'll see. (I wonder if part of the problem was that I was selecting a batch of chapters to import by using the SHIFT key, rather than the CTRL key chapter-by-chapter.) It all worked one my new project just now.

Remember that Chapter 2 is alphabetically before Chapter 10-19.

Another question. After I have imported the audio from the DVD, and combined clips into one track, deleted the 0.1 millisecond of silence, and then want to save (export) the final audio clip--should I save it as a wav. file or AC3 for the DVD?

WAV will retain the best quality at this point. Check the OPTIONS for best quality output. You can import WAV or AC3. Before you burn the DVD, check the properties (right-click on top-most item in the tree list lower left) and make sure the audio is set for highest quality.

After some thought, I have decided upon the wav. format--for exporting/saving my audio files, after combining audio tracks ("chapters," as called in my original DVD source). This is because my ultimate (final) audio-only DVD Project will have many hours (20-some hours) of music that I have imported from my source DVD. When using Sound Editor to combine the imported chapters, and creating new audio tracks, I decided to make each such track about 70-some minutes long. That way, when my friends each eventually get my 20-some-hour-long music DVD as a gift for Christmas, they will have the ability to save each 70-plus track (in wav. format) onto a 650 MB CD.

Sounds like a plan to me! Hope everything works out fine.

Roxio must remember, somewhere on my PC, an audio chapter previously imported. Because, if I try to re-import the same audio chapter again from the source DVD, it is not the same audio anymore. So I copied all my audio tracks onto a backup DVD and then deleted all these imported audio files from my hard-drive. The, when I tried to re-import the audio chapter, it appeared to be a "fresh" file and imported fine.

Later edit: Sometimes I am such an idiot. There was no reason to re-import the audio from the source DVD. Instead, I should have (and am now doing this) gone to the folder on my PC where the imported audio track was saved simultaneously when it was imported into the Sound Editor project I was creating. So, if I messed up on editing a clip/track in SE, I could bring back a fresh, un-edited clip from the saved audio file on my PC, rather than re-importing it all over again from the source DVD. Douh!

When you use sound editor the original clip is not disturbed.When you save or export the clip it creates a new clip with the changes in it.You should still have the original in an untouched state.That is unless you saved it on the same drive with the same name,then you could overwrite the original.

Well, I thought I had found the answer, but it was not to be. Although I set the number to 0.0., Sound Editor still defaults it to back 0.1. How do you get rid of this annoyance? This is causing a noticeable blip in the recording.

OK, I found the answer--finally! Instead of using the "join clips" option in Sound Editor, go to EDIT--Mix & Merge Clips. Then I needed to Export the Mix, and that exported audio clip was completely absent of those annoying "edit blips." I think I am finally happy with where this is going. (Why wasn't some old-timer here able to tell me this?)