Audacity - no basic cutting possible?

[earsex]

Hi everyone!
I used to work with a professional DAW over a long time. Now I have Audacity on my very private and secure laptop. I searched the internet, but it seemed that there is no possibility in Audacity to make just a normal cut. All tutorials are about making selection and than working with these selections (delete or produce silence). If I have a longer recording where I want to cut out silent parts or sensible information, or just to cut in smaller pieces, and if I want to slide and crossfade these parts together - how can I do that? Can anybody help me please? Just doing cuts, deleting some of the parts/regions, and crossfade the remaining parts?
Thank you!

[yeppie]

I didn´t use Audacity for years but I would guess that you can just mark the selection you want to delete and hit the "del" key.
And there is an "Edit Menu": http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/edit_menu.html
But you probably knew this before ...

[thomas]

Exactely, I do this regularly to remove unwanted noises from e.g. moving the recorder, which are otherwise a pain in the ear...

You can just read in in your file, label the corresponding piece you want to cut out, and then you select "Edit" -> Remove or Delete...

But this just works (with me at least) in the non-play-mode. So you cannot make a break and delete, you have to stop playing the recording, and the the cutting works...

[reggind]

If you want to take a piece out of one sound file and make a new file out of that piece. LIke you have 12 hours of recording and want to save some 15 minute section as a new file...

1) Hilight the part you want to save to the new file
2) Edit menu, copy it
3) File menu, new file. (Opens a blank file.)
4) (in the new blank file) Edit, paste
5) Save/Export the new file with the name you want.

[earsex]

Thanks for your answers. I don't want to make selections, but I want just to make cuts. It should be possible to make cuts with audacity? Let's say, you have a longer recording and there is some action for 10 minutes, but between these 10 minutes there are very loud noises, let's say from slammed doors. In any normal DAW like Protools or Logic I would just set a cut just a second before and after the noise, remove those regions with the noise, and the remaining regions would just slide together. If necessary I could then make some crossfades - ready. If I can only export whole selections in audacity, then I am just able to export either short pieces or long pieces with all the noise included.
There must be just a shortcut for "cut"? I mean, it is a cutting software... In Final Cut Pro it is cmd + B...

[tweaktweak]

I don't know Audaicty at all but I have it and did a quick test. When I highlight a portion of audio and press delete or use the scissor tool it does seem to "shuffle" the audio, to use a Pro Tools term. The highlighted audio was deleted and the clips merge together. Cmd+B is strictly an Avid key command.

Don't know it this helps at all.