— Appeal from a judgment of the County Court of Schenectady County (Stroebel, Jr., J.), rendered November 10, 1982, upon a verdict convicting defendant of the crimes of attempted robbery in the second degree and criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree.
Defendant, Ferrara and the Wells brothers were jointly indicted on robbery and weapons possession charges. After a trial of over seven weeks and some two days of deliberations, the jury found defendant guilty of attempted robbery in the second degree and criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree. The jury was unable to arrive at a verdict as to the codefendants’ criminal responsibility for attempted robbery, but found each of them guilty of criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree. Following sentencing,* defendant initiated the instant appeal.
We similarly find no basis for upsetting defendant’s convictions on his claim that the trial court committed various errors in the reception of evidence. The tapes were redacted to remove any reference to uncharged crimes and, therefore, the trial court did not commit the error concerning the same tapes which was the ground for reversal in defendant’s earlier burglary conviction (see People v Ward, 62 NY2d 816). The People sufficiently established the identity and chain of custody of the gunshot-residue evidence to support its admissibility (see People v Connelly, 35 NY2d 171, 174-175) and there was an adequate foundation for the expert testimony introduced on that issue. Nor was error committed in the use of transcripts of the tapes as an aid to the jury’s understanding while listening to the conversations recorded thereon, since defendant has not pointed to any significant inaccuracies in the transcripts (see People v Kuss, 81 AD2d 427, 429-430).
The decision to grant or deny a severance is generally left to the discretion of the trial court (People v Bornholdt, 33 NY2d 75, 87, cert den sub nom. Victory v New York, 416 US 905). The protracted length of the actual trial in the instant case lends support to the trial court’s discretionary denial of a separate trial here. Under these circumstances, a severance would only have been required if it appeared that “a joint trial would so prejudice a defendant as to deny him a fair trial” (People v Haynes, 88 AD2d 1070). Defendant has not shown any such prejudice here. First, the mere fact that he was the only defendant who did not take the witness stand does not alone give rise to any inference of prejudice, particularly since the trial court gave proper instructions on the effect of his failure to testify. We find no record support for defendant’s claim that counsel for the codefendants either expressly or impliedly commented on his failure to testify. Similarly, we can find no prejudice arising out of the single oblique reference to a previous proceeding involving defendant, made during the cross-examination of McCloud by a codefendant’s attorney. Nor was defendant prejudiced by the testimony of the codefendants implicating him. Defendant had no cognizable right to be shielded from the testimony of the other participants in the crime and no guarantee that they would not have been called to testify against him at a separate trial, since their cases could have been disposed of before his trial or they could have been granted immunity. In any event, the record discloses that the thrust of the defense tactics of the other participants was to place the primary responsibility for the crime upon McCloud, rather than upon defendant. Finally, on the severance issue, there was nothing in the trial court’s Sandoval rulings which restricted defendant’s attorney from fully cross-examining any of his codefendants, and this, by itself, is sufficient to distinguish the instant case from that of People v Rodriguez (91 AD2d 591), upon which defendant principally relies.
Finding nothing in defendant’s remaining contentions to merit reversal and no reason to modify his sentence on the ground of excessiveness, we affirm.
Judgment affirmed. Mahoney, P. J., Kane, Main, Casey and Levine, JJ., concur.
*.
Defendant was sentenced as a predicate felon to concurrent prison sentences of 3Vfe to 7 years for his conviction of attempted robbery in the second degree and llA to 15 years for his conviction of criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree.