"Insert silence" won't work when editing audio

Question

Greetings. Forgive me if this topic has been addressed
before. If anybody has experienced this issue and has a suggestion,
I'd be very grateful.
I'm relatively new to Captivate 2.0, as are my colleagues.
When editing audio in a .cp file, I often cannot insert silence at
the beginning or end of a clip. The flat silence appears on the
waveform, I click OK, I exit the editor as usual -- and the clip
plays back at its original length, with no silence. If I attempt to
insert silence in the middle of a clip -- no problem!
I hope I'm simply missing something obvious. Thanks in
advance for any help!

Answer 1

Well Jeannine8, you are close, but the reason your "fix"
works is because your recorded "silence" is probably white-noise,
not total silence. Allow me to explain please ...
Captivate does want to truncate (clip off) real (complete and
total) silence from the beginning or end of any waveform. So the
trick to adding silence to the beginning or end is to make sure the
silence actually contains *some* blip in the waveform (however
tiny). How to do that? Glad you asked!
1) In the Captivate WAV editor, insert your silence.
2) Now grab
any tiny, tiny piece of the audible waveform and copy it.
3) Then paste it to the very beginning of the waveform.
4) Last, use the "Volume" editor to reduce the volume below
human hearing level.
Note, if the "clip" you copied was extremely loud, you may
have to reduce the volume, close the volume control, then reopen it
and reduce it a 2nd time. This is because Captivate only allows you
to reduce volume to a minimum of 10% of the original.
All that said, I want to emphasize that "Jeannine8"'s fix
will normally work, and shows a lot of moxie ... so thanks,
"Jeannine8". And if opening the microphone and hitting the "Record"
button for a second or two in a semi-quiet room seems easier to
you, go for it. But if you know the reason
why it works, I think you will be happier in the long term.
Have a great day folks!
.