A stitch, in time, saves work

When you hear the words “trim” and “stitch” your thoughts will probably immediately turn towards embroidery and not audio, which will probably make you wonder why we’re discussing this here. Rest assured, however, that you have not accidentally clicked on the wrong link and been directed to “Needlework in Focus” - Trim and Stitch are also functions available in AudioTools Server, as part of the AudioEdit module.

The Trim function is used to remove sections of audio, usually from the start or end of a file, while the Stitch function is used to combine two (or more) audio files together. In this edition of AudioTools (not Needlework) in Focus we will look at some practical examples of how these functions can be used in an audio workflow. I promise to keep the sewing references to a minimum!

There's a lot packed into AudioTools Server.

Seamless rebranding

A good example of the two functions working together would be Logo Replacement. We all know companies rebrand all of the time, whether it be a new name or a new logo, but what do you do if your entire back catalog is using your old branding? Do you leave it as it is, or do you try and change it? This was the dilemma facing a customer of ours. They’d recently carried out a rebrand, including a shiny new audio logo that they wanted to include in their extensive library of archived content. The problem was that this archived content already included their old logo, which, therefore, needed replacing. Doing this manually would have taken hundreds of hours, so an automated solution was required. This is where AudioTools Server comes in.

We were able to assist the customer in devising a workflow that automatically trimmed the first few seconds off the input file (removing the old logo) and seamlessly stitched on the audio from the new logo in its place. All their operators needed to do now was drop any files that needed the change into a watch folder, and everything would take place without any manual intervention.

Let's swap that old audio logo for new.

Filename-based automation

In the previous example, the audio being stitched was consistent, as the same logo was always inserted each time, but for another of our customers, the challenge was more complex. As a multinational religious broadcaster, they receive and process hundreds of hours of content every day from independent providers across the globe at their US headquarters. As part of their wider audio processing workflow, they needed to insert intro and outro audio into every file they processed. Unlike with a generic logo, the audio to be stitched was region-specific, meaning it would vary depending on the country that it was intended for. Being watch folder driven, having separate workflows for each territory was not going to be practical. They also wanted the workflow to be dynamic to make it easier to add new territories to their growing portfolio.

The answer to this conundrum lay in the naming structure of their source media. All of their filenames started with a region-specific identifier of a defined number of characters, as did the intro/outro audio that they needed to stitch to it. On receiving a new file, the AudioTools workflow was configured to look at the first few characters in the filename and then use this to derive the filepaths for the audio to be stitched. The workflow then checks that the associated intro/outro audio files exist and, if so, stitches them onto the main program audio. This could all be handled by a single AudioTools Server workflow, without any need for somebody having to manually search for, and link, the various required files like some extended game of hunt the thimble!

(For non-Anglophiles, "hunt the thimble" is a game where one person hides an object, and the others must find it - Ed.)

So next time somebody mentions trimming and stitching to you, don’t immediately think about arts and crafts, but how these functions could help you with your audio operations. To find out more about the AudioTools AudioEdit module, please reach out to your AudioTools Server representative for more information. We’d love to hear from you.