Getting the most out of Cutroom

Installing

Windows

1. Download the installer and run it.
2. The installer isn't code-signed yet, so Windows may show Windows protected your PC. Click More info, then Run anyway. Your browser may also ask whether to keep the file: choose Keep.
3. Install for everyone (needs admin rights), or pick just for me on the first page if you don't have them.
4. Cutroom appears in the Start menu. It also adds itself to Open with for WAV, MP3, AIFF, FLAC and OGG files, without taking over whatever opens them now.

Mac

1. Download the disk image, open it and drag Cutroom into Applications.
2. It's signed and notarised by Apple, so it opens without warnings. It runs on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs with macOS 11 Big Sur or later.
3. The first time you record, macOS asks to let Cutroom use the microphone. Say OK, or it can't record.

The Edit View

Cutroom opens in the Edit View, for cutting one file to the sample.

• Files (left): every file you have open. Click one to edit it; each keeps its own undo history, cues, selection and zoom.
• Overview bar (top): the whole file. The highlighted box is what's on screen: drag it to move around, drag its edges to zoom, double-click for the whole file.
• Waveform: one lane per channel. The selection shows in light; the yellow line is the cursor.
• Transport (bottom middle): stop, play, pause, play to end, loop; go to start, rewind, fast forward, go to end, record.
• Zoom buttons (beside the transport): zoom in, zoom out, the whole file, and zoom to the selection. Rest the pointer on one to see its name.
• Time display and boxes: where the cursor is (or the playhead, while it plays), and the start, end and length of the selection and of the view.
• Meters: the level of what's playing, or of the input while you record.

Editing a call

1. Open a file with Ctrl+O (Cmd+O on a Mac), the Open button, or by dropping it on the window. MP3, WAV, AIFF, FLAC, Ogg and M4A all open.
2. Play with Space. Press it again to stop.
3. Select by dragging across the waveform. Drag past either edge and the view scrolls with you, so a selection can run on beyond what's on screen. Shift-click extends a selection, and H/J and K/L nudge its left and right edges.
4. Cut it: Delete removes the selection, and Ctrl+T keeps only the selection (trim). Cut, copy and paste are the usual Ctrl+X, C and V.
5. Changed your mind? Ctrl+Z undoes and Ctrl+Y redoes, as far back as you like. View > Undo History lists every edit by name: click one to go straight back to it.

A few more worth knowing: F8 drops a cue marker at the cursor, and Ctrl+L / Ctrl+R / Ctrl+B edit the left, right or both channels. The mouse wheel zooms around the pointer, and right-clicking the waveform opens the edit menu.

Effects and preview

Everything is in the Effects menu: Normalize (to a peak or to a loudness such as EBU R128), Amplify, fades, the Graphic Equalizer, Noise Reduction, Delete Silence, Dynamics, Hard Limiter, Stretch and more. An effect works on the selection, or on the whole file if nothing is selected. F2 repeats the last effect with its dialog, F3 without.

In the Graphic Equalizer, press Preview and the selection plays round and round through the EQ. Move a slider or pick a preset and you hear the change straight away. Press OK to apply exactly what you heard, or Cancel to leave the file alone. Double-click a slider to put it back to 0 dB.

Your own VST3 effects (and Audio Units on a Mac) are under Effects > Plugins, with a Preview button too.

Clean Up and DeClip

Clean Up (the button beside Auto Edit, or Effects > Clean Up Speech) takes the noise out from under a voice: a fan, hiss, a busy room, the noise on a phone line. There's no noise print to capture first. Then, unless you say otherwise, Studio Voice gives it a studio sound. It works on the selection, or the whole file if nothing is selected, and runs on your own computer.

• How much noise to take away: Natural (the default) takes up to 18 dB of noise away, so the voice keeps a little of its room. Light takes 12 dB, Strong 30 dB, and All the noise it can find as much as it can.
• Then: Studio voice, −16 LUFS (the default, for podcasts and online), Studio voice, −23 LUFS (broadcast), Studio voice, keep its loudness, or Noise only to leave the tone and level as they were.
• The audio stays the same length and in time, so it's safe on part of a file or a track in a package. Ctrl+Z undoes it.
• On a Mac it needs macOS 13 (Ventura) or later.

What Studio Voice does

It measures the recording's own tone over the stretches where someone is talking and brings it toward the sound of a clean studio voice: the low boom of a small room or a mic held too close is cut, and the presence and air that laptop, headset and phone mics lose are put back. Then it evens the voice out with gentle compression, turns down any sharp esses that stick out (ordinary ones are left alone), and sets the loudness with a −1 dBTP true-peak ceiling.

• It only lifts what is really in the recording. A phone call has nothing above about 3.4 kHz, and Studio Voice won't try to boost hiss into treble that was never there.
• It never boosts below 250 Hz, and it cuts the top end by at most 6 dB, so a bright voice isn't made dull.
• Use it on a voice, not on music: it is tuned for speech.

DeClip (Effects > DeClip) repairs clipping: a caller shouting into the phone flattens the tops of the waveform, and DeClip redraws them from the audio either side, then turns the whole thing down just enough for the new peaks to fit. It tells you how many it rebuilt, or that it found none and left the audio alone. Auto Edit's clean-up does this first, whenever a call is clipped.

Auto Edit

Auto Edit does the first pass of an edit for you. Open a phone-in and press Auto Edit (beside Open, or Effects > Auto Edit Call). Cutroom listens to the whole call on your own computer and lists every cut it would make. Nothing changes until you press Apply.

The first time

Auto Edit needs its speech models, about 2.5 GB, downloaded once. The window shows where they'll go (Change... puts them on another drive) and how much space is free there. Press Download: each model shows its progress, and on a fast connection it's done in a minute or two. After that Auto Edit works offline. Your audio is never uploaded.

Reviewing the cuts

• Each kind of cut has a colour: fillers (ums and ahs), repeats ("I, I was"), pauses (shortened to a natural gap), and the presenter's "yeah"s and "mm-hm"s between the caller's sentences.
• Click a cut in the list to select it on the waveform, ready to play. Untick it to keep it, or untick a whole kind at the top.
• Overlaps (the presenter talking over the caller) are shown, never cut. Sounds nobody turned into a word are listed but unticked: listen before you tick them.
• Level sets how hard it goes: Light, Standard or Aggressive.
• Apply makes every ticked cut at once, as one undo step: Ctrl+Z puts the whole call back.

Safe to air, and levelled

Auto Edit also looks for what shouldn't go to air, and can level the call when it's done. The choices are in the row along the top of the review window.

• Swearing: strong swear words and slurs. Swearing bleeped covers each with a tone and keeps the call the same length; Swearing cut out removes the word. Mild words ("bloody", "crap") are left alone, and so are words with an everyday meaning too ("a knob of butter", "blue tits").
• Personal: a phone number (eight digits or more, however it's read out: "oh seven seven double oh..."), a postcode (UK, including BT postcodes, and Irish Eircodes) or a house number and street. Personal info cut takes it out; choose Personal info bleeped to cover it instead. Names and towns are left alone: they're usually the point of the call. So are dates, times and prices ("between 1914 and 1918", "10:30", "£1,250").
• Intro/outro: the line check before the call starts ("hello, can you hear me?") is trimmed at every level, as long as nothing but checking the line comes before it. From Standard, so is the wrap-up at the end ("stay on the line and we'll take your details"), but only when Cutroom can tell the caller from the presenter, and never while the caller is still saying something that matters. At Aggressive it also finds the presenter's lead-in ("how are you today?"), unticked for you to listen to first.
• Level to −23 LUFS (or −16, −14, or No clean-up): after the cuts, the caller's phone line gets a clean-up EQ and is brought up to the presenter's level, then the whole call is normalised to that loudness with a −1 dBTP true-peak ceiling. A voice-over is just normalised. It's its own undo step, straight after the cuts.

Auto Edit for voice-overs

Open a raw voice-over and press Auto Edit. When it hears only one voice, it switches to Voice-over mode by itself (you can switch modes at the top of the review window).

• Breaths between the lines are made 15 dB quieter, so the read still breathes naturally. Choose Breaths cut out to remove them instead.
• Retakes: a line read again ("Coming up at five. Coming up at five, the news headlines.") keeps the last take and cuts the first.
• Ums and long pauses go too, as on a call. Apply is one undo step here as well.

Saving

Ctrl+S saves the file in place (Cutroom never re-encodes an MP3 over itself: it asks for a format instead). File > Save As (Ctrl+Shift+S) picks a format, and File > Save Selection As saves just the selection. Each save starts in the folder you last saved to, so a run of clips cut from one file all land together.

Choose a preset, or set the format (WAV, FLAC or MP3), sample rate, mono or stereo, bit depth or MP3 bitrate yourself, and add tags. The line at the bottom says what you'll get and roughly how big it'll be. Then Choose File....

Batch processing, and splitting at cues

File > Batch Process does the same to a whole set of files: choose them, then the steps (DeClip, Clean Up, a Graphic EQ preset, Studio Voice, and a loudness such as −23 LUFS; with Studio Voice on, "Leave the level as it is" keeps each file's own loudness), then the format and a folder. Each file keeps its own name; one saved beside its original gets "(processed)" added, and nothing is ever written over a file that's already there.

File > Export Between Cues splits the open file at its cues (F8 drops one at the cursor). Record the whole phone-in hour, drop a cue at the start of each call, and each stretch becomes a file of its own, numbered and named after its cue, levelled to a loudness if you choose.

Mic Check

Recording at home, or new to setting levels? Options > Mic Check (also in the Transport menu) tells you what to change before you record.

1. Set yourself up as you would to record, and pick your mic under Input. The meter shows your level as you talk: aim for the green.
2. Press Start and stay quiet for three seconds, so Cutroom can hear the room.
3. Read the line it shows out loud, at your normal volume, then press Done Reading.

Each check comes back green, amber or red, with what to do about it:

• Level: too quiet, too loud, or distorting. Aim for peaks around −6 dB.
• Background noise: fans, traffic, the computer, and how far your voice stands above them.
• Hum: mains hum at 50 or 60 Hz, usually a charger or a cable next to a power lead.
• Room echo: whether your voice hangs on in the room. Get closer and record somewhere soft.
• Pops: blasts of breath on P and B sounds, or the boom of being too close.
• Mic quality: a Bluetooth or cheap headset sends phone-quality sound; a wired mic is far better.
• Stereo: on a stereo input, whether your voice is only on one side (choose the single input instead).

Change what it says and press Check Again. If the audio device changes or stops during a check, Mic Check stops and says so: close it and open it again. Mic Check records nothing into your file and nothing leaves your computer.

Recording

1. Press F4 to pick your audio device and input.
2. Run Options > Mic Check the first time, or press F10 to watch the input level on the meters before you start.
3. Ctrl+Space (or the red button) records into the file at the cursor; press it again to pause. Recording goes straight to disk, so there's no length limit, and Cutroom warns you before the disk fills.

Punch and Roll

For voice-overs: fluffed a line? Put the cursor just before it (or select from there) and choose Transport > Punch and Roll. You hear three seconds of what comes before, to find your pace, then it records from the cursor. Press Space to stop: the new take replaces everything from the cursor on. Ctrl+Z puts back what was there. Give it a shortcut of your own with Alt+K.

The Multitrack View

F12 switches between the Edit View and the Multitrack View, for building a package from several files: a call over a bed, a trail, a promo.

Drag files onto tracks, from your computer or from the Files list (the files you have open, with your edits), then move, trim, split and crossfade the clips. Right-click a clip for Split Here, Split at Cursor, Open in Edit View and Delete Clip, or press S to split at the cursor. Right-drag a clip to move it. Each track has volume, pan, mute, solo, an input for recording and effect slots; right-click a track's name to give it a colour, and draw volume and pan envelopes over a clip.

Auto-duck: right-click a music bed's track name and tick Duck Under Other Tracks. While anyone on the other tracks is talking the bed dips 12 dB, then comes back up after them; it shows DUCKS on the track. It works the same in playback and the mixdown, and it's off unless you turn it on.

File > Mix Down to File turns the session into one file, and File > Save Session keeps the whole thing to come back to.

Shortcuts

On a Mac, Ctrl is Cmd. Alt+K shows every shortcut and lets you change any of them.

Help and bugs

Cutroom saves your work every 15 seconds and recovers it after a crash, but it's an alpha: keep your original recordings.

Found a bug? Help > Show Log Folder opens Cutroom's logs, including a crash report if it went down. Tell us what you were doing and attach the latest log. It helps more than anything.