Gotta admit, never heard that one before! Is that some kind of function found in a specific computer audio software program? If so, what does it do?

If you're talking about the one in PT-it's fine! :)

its the PT command to:

'take all these little regions of audio on one track and make them into one solid block"

I belive it has no bad effect on the audio quality, just uses digital voodoo math to glue all the sections together.

:)

I haven't heard any sound quality degradation from it, but it significantly increases the size of your audio file.

I presume this feature is available because some people like to export WAV files for max compatibility when working in other DAW environments. If all WAVs start at the same time, all you have to do is import the WAVs into a foriegn DAW and you are done. Also, I read that NIN used 3 seperate Protools rigs with 3 different people to assemble their last album (I hesitate to use the word record). They would keep all the WAVs on one server and just copy them locally, process them, then send them back to the server for the other guys to review. Seems like a very disjointed way of working though. Maybe that's why it sucked.

I belive it has no bad effect on the audio quality, just uses digital voodoo math to glue all the sections together.

There is one possible upset from it Julian which has stopped me from using it as way of tiding up my screen and drive. If you have the automatic crossfade time set then at each join of regions the consolidation applies a crossfade using the uncovered data of each of the adjacent regions.

I used to use the strip silence , consolidation and compact audio selections to shrink my files and tidy my screen , but was finding inexplicable glitches appearing which I had to edit out by hand. Switching the automatic crossfade to 0ms sorts this problem out.

I just tried it, seems kind of cool. Amazing how many features I never use and don't know about. Someday I might even open the manual.... NAHHHH!

Anyway, the main use for me is if you have a track with a lot of punches and edits, and you need to slide it around, consolidation will insure the track all moves together - many's the time when I didn't get every single slice selected and messed up the timing later in the song. I would use it judiciously though, because of the disadvantage that you create a new sound file, thereby taking up more space on your drives/backups. Of course if you delete your original files, you may even gain room (like if you are only a 5 second segment of a 5 minute file). But you better be sure your boundaries are exactly where you want them, because you won't be able to "untrim" the consolidated file.

"If you have the automatic crossfade time set then at each join of regions the consolidation applies a crossfade using the uncovered data of each of the adjacent regions."

So...wuz wrong wid dat?

If that is what you are monitoring, "printing it" is cool, (if you are cool with what you have been hearing that is...)

I belive.. etc (ahem!) :o

I found that it would create non zero join points a few ms away from the origional join point of the audio. Mostly on Low freq waveforms.

Also after using strip silence to emulate a gate and then consolidating the stripped regions , there was now a bit of fluff before and after the region start/end. A result that was not what I was origionally hearing.

I dunno if it is for the reason I described or if when you drag an audio region over another , the masked region is somehow still there and will contribute its data to the fade.