Automatically add a label at the start of each track

I have imported 100 mp3 files into a new Audacity project. Each mp3 is imported as a separate track – which is what I want. I can easily align the tracks end to end by Edit > Select > All followed by Tracks > Align Tracks > Align End to End.

Now I want to create a label track with labels coresponding to the start (or end) of each track.

One way to do this is by selecting a track (by clicking on its side bar, under its name) and then choosing Tracks > Add Label at Selection. But there are two problems with this method:

  • The label is a region label, not a point label. I would prefer point labels.
  • I have to select each track individually and then click Tracks > Add Label at Selection (or press Ctrl+B). This would be a lot of work for 100 tracks.

Is there any way to automatically add labels at the start of each and every track?

I am running Audacity 2.1.3 on Windows 7 Pro. Thanks for your help.

Can we take a step back… Why do you want a point label at the start (or end) of each audio clip?

Each of my 100 mp3 files is a segment of speech about 8 minutes long. The files have some overlap – each file overlaps with the next one by about 10 seconds. This means that when I align the tracks end to end, there is some redundant content (speech content, not music). I will need to clip the beginning (or end) of each track to remove the redundant content. In other words, I’m trying to recreate an original, of which I only have (overlapping) segments.

The overlaps/redundant parts are each only approximately 10 seconds long – some are more like 8 seconds, some are more like 12 seconds. This means that I will have to manually listen to the end of one track and the beginning of the next to determine how much to clip from each end to remove all the overlaps. As far as I can tell, there is not yet a way to automatically find overlaps in audacity (see https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/find-overlap-of-tracks-and-align-them/20130/1 and http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Proposal_Audio_Diff)… not that I’m complaining… I’m sure this would be extremely time consuming to implement! (And I’m not a programmer so I can’t help with it!)

So I will need to manually remove the redundant parts, which is fine. But to do so, I would like to be able to quickly “seek” (i.e., move the selection cursor) to the start (or end) of the track, since working with 100 tracks in one project may be unwieldly. It seems that an easy way to do this would be to double-click a label in a label track. Thus I think having a point label at the start (or end) of each track would be helpful. Does that make sense?

I’m a novice, so thank you for being patient with me.