Cutting A Song To Fit An Edit?

I'm in the middle of an edit and the client wanted a bunch of stuff removed after ive already nearly finished the piece...classic. Normally id add more b-roll and massage things around to fill it out...but ive added everything useable i have pretty much.

Id like to just chop off the ending of the song somehow, and remove a bit of middle section of the song and add then add the ending back, thus making the overall run time shorter...ive seen this done years ago in some tutorial but have no idea how to go about doing it now. Trust me...im trying, lol.

The end of the song coincides with something in the video so i cant just fade the whole song out earlier.

Any tips on how to do this? I cant seem to find any tutorials anywhere...

You simply need to find a section in the middle of the song to cut out, where the new out point, and new in point, give you matches. Look for the ending of a musical phrase to cut at, then the start of a matching musical phrase to cut at again. Some short cross fade made help. It is tricky, but you can do it. Just have to listen to and be VERY familiar with the song.

Ben's absolutely right.

Turn on audio waveforms, and make the track height pretty large. If there's much of a beat structure to the music you'll start to see matching patterns – the basic technique is to blade the audio track, then overlap it so the spikes line up. Then trim back the overlap, and shove a little cross-fade in there (make sure it's a +3dB constant-power curve: right-click the little fade nubbin on the audio track). If you can arrange the edit so it runs under something loud and distracting to disguise it, all the better.

There's a bit of a knack to making it work, mostly in spotting places in the music where you can make a clean edit.

FCPX makes it straightforward to attach the two bits of your audio clip to specific moments in the sequence. Put a gap clip into the primary storyline, and trim that to line up the audio edit. Then replace the gap clip with usable pictures - position mode ('p') will allow you shove clips into the storyline without rippling the audio edit out of place.