Simply hitting delete after highlighting will cut that part of the audio
file, essentially muting it. And 'looks' like silence if you were to
bounce that track down.

(Bounce or merge soundbites.)

That's fine within a soundbite, but where that doesn't work is if you
need a passage of silence at the end of a soundbite, such as for a final
reverb tail. And of course you have to create a single soundbite for
everything, if you want to have a place for a reverb tail to exist.

Admittedly, what I'm doing here is perhaps a little unusual: I'm not
doing a traditional multitracking-like construction of music, and then
creating a final mixdown of everything. I'm creating a very large set
of very short foreign-language (Mandarin) vocabulary exercises, each
perhaps 10-15 seconds long. Each of them has to be a its own single
soundbite that I later need to export to a block of audio that becomes a
very short track on a CD.

So, each such exercise has to exist within a single soundbite so that it
can be exported as a distinct audio chunk. So, deleting a short passage
of audio wouldn't work, because it is no longer contained in a single
exportable soundbite.

--

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buried in spam.)