Delete part of a recording

[lebaubles]

Once a week I record a radio show that starts in the middle of the night. I start recording the station when I go to bed. What I cannot figure out is how to delete the couple of hours of the beginning of the recording so I can start listening to it when the show I want to listen to actually starts. I try to do the edit section but the options are not available. Can some one give me a simple step by step to be able to do this process. Is there a fast forward ability to get to the the part I want to start to listen to? Any help would be much appreciated.

[kozikowski]

When you stop recording. Control-F to put the whole show on your timeline. Click at the two-hour mark or wherever and SpaceBar play to find the beginning of the show. Click-Drag to the left and press delete. The first two hours of useless recording will vanish.

You don't have to do it all at once. You can take off most of it and then do it again taking off more and use the zoom tools to get it down to the first second of the show.

Control-E Zoom to selection (select something first)
Control-3 Zoom out a little bit
Control-F Zoom out full

Koz

[Irish]

Alternatively, you can upgrade to Audacity 1.3.11, which has a timed recording feature.
Tell it at what time you want it to start and finish recording, and go to bed.

PO'L

[kozikowski]

<<<Tell it at what time you want it to start and finish recording, and go to bed.>>>

Heck. Anybody could do that...

Koz

[waxcylinder]

Just one little thing to be aware of - there is a little elusive bug that rears its head from time to time with the "Timer Record" feature - whereby Audacity does not honour the end time and just carries on merrily recording. It can only be stopped by aborting the process. You can then re-start Audacity and it should recover the project ok.

Note carefully that an un-checked recording process like this can eat your available disk space ...

It doesn't happen very often - but if it happens to you and you can find any concrete clues as to why and when this happens the developers would be delighted to hear from you.

WC

[lebaubles]

I want to thank you for all your help. After a few minutes I was able to figure out how to delete the unwanted part of my recording Did download 1.3.11 Looking forward to actually using. Still have my other problem Did a search several different ways and can't find .au or .aup folder but I have the _data file. So wish I could get it into one unit to play. Again thank you for all your help. Your all great

[waxcylinder]

Still have my other problem Did a search several different ways and can't find .au or .aup folder but I have the _data file.

Your operating system is probably set so that it doesn't show certain filetypes and maybe not file extensions - Windows is set that way by default for example.

FYI

When you save an Audacity project as <project_name> it creates a number of things

1. a top level master project file called <project_name>.aup
2. a folder at the same filing level called <project_name>_data
3. and within the folder a sub-folder structure with lots of little .au files - segments of the recording (mainly audio clips - but a couple of them are graphics files)

When you re-open a project with Audacity you should always open the <project_name>.aup top level file. This tells Audacity how to thread together all the little .au files. It is deliberately designed this way so that Audacity doesn't have to open and work with a single humungously large file, which would hamper performance. You should not be attempting to open or manipulate any individual .au files.

When you have finished editing your Audacity project you can Export it from Audacity as a WAV file or MP3 file depending what sound quality you wish to achieve. WAV files are around ten times larger than the equivalent MP3 files but are uncompressed and thus the audio quality is higher.

WC