Recording vinyl albums multiple tracks/adding labels

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

A couple of issues with recording and adding labels to the tracks of an album after recording on Audacity 2.1.0 for WIndows.

  • I add a label to start of track(by going to Tracks on the menu and whether it’s “at selection” or “at playback position”) and when I finish the label and play the song the start of the track always flips back three seconds screwing up the track. If I try to manually the label it can further mess things up.

  • I export the file to my hard drive and then when adding files to I tunes I have to name the album and other info for every song. How can I input the name of the album just once so it isn’t so repetitive?

  • I recently recorded both sides of an album and somehow when I go to playback what I recorded , the two sides have been recorded at the same time so I hear them together. Which I don’t want.

2

I recently recorded both sides of an album

If you pressed Stop between the two sides, Audacity will start over at time zero with a second track under the first one and play them both at once. That’s not deadly.

You can fix the alignment with Tracks > Align Tracks > Align End to End. That’s from memory. I think that’s the one. It should shift the bottom track so it aligns with the top one in time order.

http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tracks_menu.html

You can Export each one individually by clicking just above MUTE and File > Export Selected.

You can not do that in the first place by pressing P pause recording, flip the record over and P start it up again.

Or you can actually Stop the recording, but start it up again in the right place with Append Recording Shift-R.

Koz

3
  • I add a label to start of track(by going to Tracks on the menu and whether it’s “at selection” or “at playback position”) and when I finish the label and play the song the start of the track always flips back three seconds screwing up the track. If I try to manually the label it can further mess things up.

Personally, I don’t use labels. I export one song at a time (Export Selected Audio) to separate files (with the song name as the file name).

  • I export the file to my hard drive and then when adding files to I tunes I have to name the album and other info for every song. How can I input the name of the album just once so it isn’t so repetitive?

[u]MP3Tag[/u] allows you to select multiple files in an album folder and edit/enter all of the common information, and then you can select one song at a time to enter the title and track number, etc. MP3Tag works on most audio formats (not just MP3), except last time I tried it didn’t work with WAVs.

4

That is an old version now. I recommend you obtain the current Audacity 2.1.3 release from us at Audacity ® | Download for Windows.

Tracks don’t move unless you enabled Tracks > Sync-Lock Tracks by mistake.

In Export Multiple, you may want to check (tick) the box “Include audio before first label”. Otherwise if your first label is the start of the second song, you won’t export the first song.

In case you have a fake version of Audacity, I really recommend you get 2.1.3 from us.

If you are talking about adding metadata in Audacity, uncheck “Show Metadata Tags editor prior to export step” in
Import / Export Preferences. Then enter the tags common to all tracks at File > Edit Metadata Tags… before exporting.


Gale

5

Thanks all for your suggestions. Just getting back to this now and about to dive back in and fix the issues with the album btw is Rolling Stones - Hot Rocks.

Later…So the align tracks end to end fixed my problem thank you.

I wasn’t able to select individual tracks without labeling them. And then once I labled them there doesn;t seem to be a way to select individual tracks based on the the labelling.Furthermore at the end of a side how do label the end of the song ? and so I had to export multiple tracks as opposed to exporting individual tracks. I don’t feel like using a 3rd party software in order to label a whole album’s info all at once to prep it for ITunes. I wonder why can’t the metadata info in Audacity (album name etc) flip over with the Export to my hard drive and then in turn be there for adding the file to ITunes? I’m manually adding the metadata twice.

6

Are you now using 2.1.3 as recommended?

You don’t need to label the end of the song for Export Multiple, only the starts of the songs. See this page Splitting a recording into separate tracks - Audacity Manual.

If you don’t like Export Multiple or labels, then click and drag to select the first song then File > Export Selected Audio. Repeat for the other songs.

Or are you asking to export one file and have the file know where the individual songs are in the file, so you can navigate between them? It doesn’t work like that because most audio formats don’t have any support for marking songs within the file. If that is the problem, export multiple files by any method and put each file in an iTunes playlist.

What audio format are you exporting to? If you are exporting to WAV, iTunes does not support metadata in WAV so it won’t see Audacity’s tags. In that case you will have to enter the metadata in iTunes instead. It is a limitation in iTunes, not Audacity. You can export as AIFF if you want to export in a lossless format - iTunes understands metadata in AIFF files.

If you want to turn Audacity’s Metadata Editor off, go to Import / Export Preferences and uncheck the box “Show Metadata Tags editor prior to export step”. Then you can just add the metadata once in iTunes.


Gale