Creating a Radio Edit example

The editing example provided below can be followed step-by-step if you have the Bryan Adams' Everything I Do I Do It For You song in your Ots file collection. In this example you will be editing the outro of the Everything I Do I Do It For You song.

Editing Bryan Adams' Everything I Do I Do It For You

Both the album and greatest hits versions of this song have an extended section at the end that goes on for a few minutes. DJs and radio stations rarely play this extended ending. What is the proper way to remove it? Traditionally you would have permanently edited the Wave/MP3 before converting to Ots. With Ots Studio and the ACI chunk handler you don't need to do this, plus you can keep both versions for those rare times when you do want to play the full version!

What we are going to do here, is create a "Radio Edit" version of the song, without taking up any additional storage space on your hard disk drive!

Load the Ots file that contains the "Everything I Do I Do It For You" song in Ots Studio -- click on the button and navigate to the file that you want to edit. Alternatively, from within a Windows explorer window, simply right-click on an Ots file, and choose the Edit option. This will open Ots Studio and load the file you have clicked on. If it's an Ots Album file with multiple items then it may look something like the following:

Chunk map view of Ots Album file - So Far So Good

We need to create a new item for the radio edit version, so right-click on the item in the chunk map, e.g. right-click on (Everything I Do) I Do It For You, and choose the Clone Item (Using References to Existing Chunks) option.
A new item will now be visible in your item list, called (Everything I Do) I Do It For You [Edit].

Adding the radio edit item

Right-click on the ACI chunk of this newly created item, and select Unlink (Create Unique Chunk For This Reference). This operation unlinks the ACI chunk in this item, from the ACI of the originating item. This ensures the changes made to this chunk don't effect the original item.

Note: The information in square brackets after each chunk shows how many other chunks reference the same information, and shows a unique ID number. When you Unlink the chunk, it becomes unique and is no longer locked to the original chunk. This allows editing of only the unique chunk, and not the reference chunk from the original track. The graphic below shows the changes when the ACI chunk is Unlinked.

Click on the Show All button. Navigate to the part of the song -- roughly in the middle -- where it dies and then restarts with the extended section. You will see your scrollbar in a similar position to this:

ACI chunk of radio edit version

Choose the Outro Trim Point option from the drop-down combo box. Right-click, and set the new point to be roughly as follows (you will obviously need to preview that part of the track first to be certain of the correct location):

Setting the Outro Trim Point

Now choose the Outro Fade Start Point from the drop-down combo box. You want to set this point a fair bit in so that there are no clicks or pops at the outro trim point, and so that the fade out is fairly length -- 2 or 3 seconds roughly. Do something like the following:

Setting the Outro Fade Start Point

Finally, choose the Outro Reference Point and set it to be near the following:

Setting the Outro Reference Point

You can trial these changes by adjusted the play mode to something like ACI - Outro into soft and then clicking the Play button. You will see how these points make the song sound just like the real released radio edit! And of course you still have the ability to play the full version if the situation demands this, and yet you have not wasted additional space on storing two versions!
Finally, apply these changes by clicking on the Apply Changes button.
To save the changes click on the button.

Realize that the biggest chunks that are normally present in Ots files are the Audio Data or Video Data chunks. These can be 3, 4, 5 (even 500) or more MB per song. So by creating a new item which links to the same Audio Data and Video Data chunk, but which has a different ACI chunk, you have essentially created your own custom edit of a track without having to actually dedicate any additional space to it.

Another good example of a song in which this is commonly done is Meatloaf's "You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth". DJs/Radio stations normally skip the intro section that consists of narrative for about 30 seconds. But there are times when it is desirable to play the entire, full length version of the song, so it's great to have both available!