"Muting" is simply reducing the volume level to zero, just like erasing an ordinary audio tape. "Cutting" completely removes a section from the audio file.
Muting is better suited to editing small sections of vocal noise than cutting. Cutting the breaths in our example would have left the rhythm of the narrative uneven and unnatural.
The street noise was cut from the file since it was located at the end of the file and did not affect the narrative rhythm.
The second file contained some mistakes on my part when reading the script. As you can see in the accompanying video tutorial, this poses no problem to a software tool such as Sound Forge.
With practice you will be able to piece together a "perfect-take" from several "mis-takes." The phrase at the end of this second voice recording was cut and pasted into a new file to allow me the opportunity to accurately place it within the finished soundtrack.
