Can't cut sound recordings in Cubase 5

Question

today I encountered a really funny problem during Cubase recording. I had recorded a guitar, and in the begining of the recording there were a few seconds of silence (the player started playing a few seconds after the recording had started). Usually, I would have cut out this part of the recording by moving the recording's bottom-right corner to the right. However, this time, even though the button was off, I could only move it to certain places.

For example, if I tried cutting the first 1.5 seconds from the beginning nothing would be cut; If I tried cutting the first 4.5 seconds from the beginning, 7 seconds would be cut. I Definitely cannot cut accurately the part I want to remove.

This problem happens only when I try to cut sound recording, and not when try to edit audio files which had already been rendered and saved.

It might be important to mention that this is not the first time I've used Cubase to record, and that I know how to work with this program.

Thanks for any piece of idea that could help me solve it!

Answer 1

Perhaps I am missing something obvious, and I am talking from memory, but in order to cut accurately, you need to change the tempo counting bar measure type in the top bar. If I remember ok, you can specify different units like beats, seconds, edges or bars. There is an option that allows you to cut by fractions of second. Even that is not 100% millimetric, but it is enough to not missing more accuracy in terms of sonic perception. I use the scissors command for splitting the track and delete the unwanted block.

Answer 2

Pressing the Alt Key and hovering the mouse over an event enables the scissor. Then it depends whether you have the "snap" button on and what type of snap (events, bars etc.) is activated. If you deactivate the snap mode, you should be able to freely cut it anywhere.

Another option is to drag the event beginning via the bottom left corner to the right to cut it from the beginning (as you have been doing before). But: if you want to cut it precisely, you should then hold down the Ctrl key while dragging the "event start".

A third option would be to select the event and change its parameters in the infoline (the line under the top bar buttons, above the events). There you can manually edit the start, end, length and offset. You can try with a "normal" event start cutting how it changes these parameters.

But to sum up, with (at least) Cubase5 and 7.0/7.5 it is possible to cut it precisely the ways I mentioned without the need of manually setting the parameters in the info line. So I assume there is still some kind of snapping activated.