Audacity Help

[AD]

.. and I suck at using it. The online tutorials and help seem to suggest there is only one way to do what I want to do, and it's pretty stupid that the user can't control things a bit better. (It is free software however...)

I have one large audio track and want to split it into smaller tracks and then export to wav files.

Is the only way to do this by adding a label track? Why can't I drag my cursor to a new position, or drag my label to a new position?

There must be an easier way than to have to get it right every time. There's not even a way that I can find to delete a label that you put in the wrong place...

Can anyone help? Is there a way to chop up a long audio file into smaller ones using Audacity?

[bradm]

Try

http://www.milosoftware.com/cdwave/

instead. It's pretty basic: you load in a big wav file, press the "split" button at the points where you want it split, and then save. This will write out one wav file per split track, with file names that start with the original name and have "01" tacked on for the first track, "02" for the second, and so on. (Note that it doesn't do anything to the original file, so it effectively doubles the amount of disk space that gets used.) You can also de-select certain tracks (like intro and outro "dead time") that you don't want written out.

Aloha,

Brad

[SolarGarlic]

I second the cdwave option. Easy as hell.

[Jaimoe]

AD, I thought you were talking about your audacious personality?

[AD]

Thanks Brad and GarlicMan. I guess I just have to select the whole track in Audacity in order to export it as a wav, and then I bring the wav into CDWave?

Jaimoe, as if you have the audacity to say something like that.

[bradm]

Thanks Brad and GarlicMan. I guess I just have to select the whole track in Audacity in order to export it as a wav, and then I bring the wav into CDWave?

What are you starting with? If that "one large audio track" you were feeding into Audacity is already a WAV file, you can just skip using Audacity and open the file in CDWav. (If you were using Audacity for something else, like EQing, for example, you'll have to export from Audacity before opening the resulting file in CDWav.)

Aloha,

Brad

[AD]

no, it's not already a wav file. it is an Audacity audio track (recorded in Audacity, format is *.au) and it's currently 1009 1 MB au files that make up the one track in the software.

[bradm]

Yeah, you'll have to export it as a wav file, which you then haul into CDWave.

Aloha,

Brad

Edited November 19, 2007 by Guest

[AD]

thanks again brad. got everything working a-ok now

[bouche]

are you going to put it on sendspace or something when you're done?

guy 1: I'm headed to Sin City for the weekend

guy 2: where?

guy 1: you know...Sin City? Las Vegas?

guy 2: Audacity!

[AD]

are you going to put it on sendspace or something when you're done?

i'm gonna run an email contest to see who gets access

[AD]

How can I raise the levels in the recording? When it was recorded the levels were too low it seems, and now when played back it's way too quiet. What is a normal volume level and how can I adjust the recording to get there?

Thanks for all the help so far

[DevO]

What is this project you're working on??

I use MixMeister to do all this stuff. Ever used that prog?

[AD]

Sadies / Gord Downie radio show. Never used that program you mentioned - would ideally like to use Audacity since all the hype suggests that this is possible to do, just don't have the know-how and the help I've found online isn't helping so far.

[bradm]

For boosting levels, you might consider using normalize. From its README:

Example 2. Suppose now you've just extracted all the wav files from the Gorilla Biscuits album "Start Today," which, you may know, is recorded at a particularly low volume. We want to make the whole album louder, but individual tracks should stay at the same volume relative to each other. For this we use batch mode. Say the files are named 01.wav to 14.wav, and are in the current directory. We invoke normalize in batch mode to preserve the relative volumes, but otherwise, everything's the default:

normalize -b *.wav

You can then fire up your mp3 encoder, and the whole album will be uniformly louder.

The main tricky bit will be installation, as it was originally a Linux program, so if you're running Windows, you'll have to get the right installation package (the second bullet under "Binary download"), unzip it in a directory, and work with/from that. You'll also need to know how to run programs in a command prompt window, but I think the example I quoted will work for what you want. (If I were doing it, I'd be super-careful, and make a backup copy of each of the .wav files before I ran them through normalize.)

Aloha,

Brad