Is there a way to ADD silence at the start when export/rendering?

[jonatello]

I like having a very brief split-second of silence at the start of a track, because I find if there's no buffer before the music starts in most players, that initial opening sound is obscured, weakened or cut off in some way. The first note or beat loses most of its punch and character.

If I add that brief bit of silence in the actual project, then everything is shifted to some fraction of a bar, instead of the nice clean, logical layout that the DAW thrives on.

I notice in the export/render pop-up, there's an option to "remove silence at start/end"...is there a way to add it? If not, that would be a great feature for a future update

[Watchful]

Most recording formats don't use silence at the front of a song, which is why Waveform doesn't directly support it. The traditional 4-5 seconds of silence between songs on an LP or CD was how that used to be handled. But with modern streaming services, you're not the first person to complain that songs can slam into each other without some intentional silence between.

There are artistic reasons for doing so, as well--such as setting up some atmosphere, etc.--before the main portion of the intro kicks in. So your request is not at all silly--in fact, I think it's a great idea.

You could of course set up a template with a blank measure in front of it, as you said. I think a bigger concern is that Waveform doesn't offer a -1 measure, so that you can do partial beats at the front of a song, like the two sixteenth notes at the start of this score.

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Waveform's inability to support this without offsetting the measures screws up exporting into sheet music.

That's been a request for a very long time. I'd personally like it to be added because I could throw in some control set up strings as a MIDI clip, which can be helpful when working with hardware-based equipment. Still waiting on that myself.

The traditional response from Tracktion appears to be shifting your song a measure over; for those who also export MIDI as sheet music, this is a non-solution, as is someone importing MIDI in for a group where everyone else is on measure 12, but you're on measure 13 because of this restriction.

Anyway, since we don't have this (yet), you could always render your audio without it, and then use a tool like Audacity to insert a couple seconds of silence at the start of your track and save it as a new file.

To be honest, allowing a partial measure as a negative measure would solve those three problems, yours being one of them!

[FigBug]

You could put a delay on the master out.