Hello. I’ve been using Audacity for a few years. It’s a great program.
I do a lot of audio editing to combine FM Radio broadcast of sporting events with the TV broadcast. I record both then bring the audio into Audacity. The goal is to adjust the FM audio to match the TV audio which acts as a reference. When complete I export the corrected FM audio and add this as an extra audio track to the original video.
To do this in Audacity I use mainly these functions:
(1) “Cut” to remove a section of audio to move it forward.
(2) “Generate Silence” to pad the audio in places to shift the audio back.
(3) “Change Tempo” because in some instances the FM audio has been time compressed or expanded because of editing in the studio, e.g. coming out of a commercial break too late they compress the live broadcast to catch back up to real time.
In all three cases I note a beginning and an ending time location of interest. Note the place that gets acted on in (1) and (2) above are in a different time location (typically during a commercial break where I don’t care) so I need to know the delta time which I unfortunately need to use a calculator to do. Also it’s not possible for me to simple select the region of time because I need to move and playback clips to confirm before editing. So there is a lot of writing down the times, doing the math manually, then typing the results back into Audacity. This is all very inefficient. So here’s what I propose or would like to have:
(1) Add the ability to create a time marks. Wherever the selection start is, I’d like to press a button to save that as a time mark. The time mark would stay there until I overwrite it. I would need a few time marks. Perhaps we could have time marks 0 through 9 although I don’t know that I need that many. TM0, TM1, TM2, etc.
(2) Ability to use the difference between time marks, e.g. TM1-TM0, for length/duration or a pair of them for ratio functions. Specifically I would use the difference in these cases:
(A) As the length value for the current selection. A button next to the area where you normally type in the length would be perfect for this.
(B) “Generate Silence” as the duration value when prompted. Again a button on that form for that would be great.
(C) “Change Tempo” ability to use 4 time marks to get the ratio for the percent change, e.g. (TM1-TM0)/(TM3-TM2). Again a button on that dialog box for this would be great.
To simplify the code and interface to do this perhaps in each of the 3 cases the time marks would have to be certain ones. E.g., as the length or duration values perhaps it would only use TM1-TM0, and for “Change Tempo” it would only use the time markers as I gave in the example.
The user can still enter lengths, duration and percent change as they normally would, but the extra (hopefully small and not intrusive) buttons could dramatically speed up editing process.
Also the ability to go a specific time mark could be very handy. Plus after an edit move the time marks where appropriate. For example if a time mark is near the end of the audio and you clip some of the beginning audio, then move the time mark so it’s still referencing the same point in the new audio stream.
These features would be very welcome and I estimate would reduce my editing time to much less than 1/2 the time required now.