Sound Activated recording minimum duration

panarea · September 19, 2012, 1:34am

Hi, I am using Lion and have installed the program from the dmg v.2.0.2.
I would like to set a minimum duration of the recording session overriding the sound activation level.
Please help ASAP.
Thanks

steve · September 19, 2012, 1:41am

That feature is not currently available.
There is a feature request logged on the Audacity wiki for:
"A post-roll delay (say 4 seconds) would allow realistic recording of dialogue " (http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Feature_Requests)
If this would provide the functionality that you require, then I can add your vote for this feature.

panarea · September 20, 2012, 4:02am

Please add this for me and let us know when it will be possible to record so that the start recording works with a “minimum recording time allowance” attached to it as an option, it would make it automatically more organic.

Gale_Andrews · September 20, 2012, 4:38am

I’ve added the vote (we are not distinguishing between pre-and post roll in votes as we would add both when we do it).

However a developer has already said this is a significant piece of work and it is not likely to happen soon. I would suggest subscribing to our announcements list ( Audacity ® | Free, open source, cross-platform audio software for multi-track recording and editing. ) and then reading the release notes for that version to see the changes.

Gale

steve · September 20, 2012, 11:01am

Perhaps we should have separate feature requests for pre- and post-roll.

I’m not a C/C++ programmer but I would expect that supporting pre-roll would be a lot more difficult to program than post-roll as pre-roll requires cyclically buffering audio while in a “wait” state, while post-roll “simply” requires a counter that starts when the input level drops below the threshold. Post-roll alone would be a significant enhancement and possibly the more important of the two (if post-roll is enabled the pre-roll can be “faked” by coughing (or any other sound) before you start recording).

Gale_Andrews · September 21, 2012, 3:00am

steve:

Gale Andrews:

I’ve added the vote (we are not distinguishing between pre-and post roll in votes as we would add both when we do it).

However a developer has already said this is a significant piece of work and it is not likely to happen soon

Perhaps we should have separate feature requests for pre- and post-roll.

I’m not a C/C++ programmer but I would expect that supporting pre-roll would be a lot more difficult to program than post-roll as pre-roll requires cyclically buffering audio while in a “wait” state, while post-roll “simply” requires a counter that starts when the input level drops below the threshold. Post-roll alone would be a significant enhancement and possibly the more important of the two (if post-roll is enabled the pre-roll can be “faked” by coughing (or any other sound) before you start recording).

I’ve moved a token three of the “Sound Activated” votes to post-roll only, which is I think the most that should be moved to be a fair reflection.

I had already thought about it, but wasn’t going to bother as I think almost all the votes (that I added) are for both pre-and post-roll. The vote says “It requires buffering of the recording for pre-roll, but is expected behaviour for this type of tool.” Plus, we also have votes for “Pre-roll (buffered) recording for all types of recording, not just Sound Activated”.

My “understanding” is that even “post-roll only” using a timer is fairly messy/invasive and that both pre- and post-roll are better done using the same looping buffer, and that we would do both for all types of recording.

Gale