Advanced setting of regions

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

I’m using Audacity to record audio into tracks. I have found it difficult for the following reasons, how can I achieve a better workflow?

  • I would like to pre-create label regions with zero gaps or overlap. In order to do this I am manually creating labels, dragging the handles out to turn them into regions, then fiddling with each region to line up the end of each one with the start of the next. This last part is especially difficult as you cannot do this unless you are zoomed in quite a lot which is impossible when recording as the view autoscrolls

  • I’d like to line up the region boundaries with the start of each audio wave visually, but I can’t do that whilst recording, again the view scrolls to current location whilst recording

  • How can I manually set the duration of the region? I can see it’s possible using “edit label” to set its start and end time, but not the duration. (obvs when working with long sessions over an hour and to millisecond precision this gets difficult calculating the number in your head)

Thanks

(Version: Audacity 2.4.2 on Win 10)

2

EDIT TO ADD (Couldn’t find the post edit button, if that is indeed possible!)

  • Is there a way to select a region within the label track? When I double-click within a region, it just selects the length of the whole track
3

Click and drag to select an arbitrary region.

If it is a “region label”, click in the label text region to select the region defined by the label.

See also: Label Tracks - Audacity Manual

4

Can’t you just use point labels?


An easy way to make multiple region labels with no gaps between:

  1. Make a selection in the audio track (or any other track type)
  2. “Ctrl + B” to create a region label
  3. “Shift + Click” near the start of the selected region and drag to the right, past the right hand end of the original selection so that what was originally the right hand end now becomes the left hand end of the selection.
  4. “Ctrl + B” to create the next label.
5

Thanks for your help!