I’m creating short audio dramas and I’m more frequently finding the need for a way to insert clips at random from a pool of files.
For example, I’m trying to get the sound of footsteps. I’ve got about 20 different footstep sound clips for each terrain that I’m using. This is so that I’m not repeating the exact same sound over and over. That sounds ugly and is distracting. Natural footsteps make slightly different sounds as you walk. Inserting these clips at random for the roughly 30 seconds that I need them is incredibly tedious and because of human nature ends up not being quite as random as I’d like.
Is there a way to do this with Audacity or is there a plugin that can do this? Bonus points if I can adjust the delay between the clips on the fly to simulate someone walking faster or slower.
Probably less effort to browse through the sounds here: https://freesound.org/search/?q=footsteps
You can use Audacity to speed up / slow down / modify the sounds in multiple ways.
I know all about freesound. There’s a few problems. First, simply speeding up a sound clip of footsteps sounds wrong. Instead of speeding up the entire clip, you have to reduce the delay between steps at a different rate with which you speed up the actual footfall in order for it to sound natural. This just puts me right back into the situation I’m in now. Besides, I’ve already got my own sounds recorded. I don’t need someone else’s as I don’t want this to be my creation without sourcing outside sounds. Freesound clips tend towards poorer quality, anyway. Good quality recordings are rare. Second, footsteps are just one of the things I need to create. I have a library of a lot of different things ready to be mixed into things that don’t really exist (ambient background tracks, etc.), or at least are not acceptable for my needs on freesound. A library of things I would love to be able to mix myself through random insertion with controllable delays. Something not unlike how https://www.ambient-mixer.com/ works. But even that lacks the basic functions I described before.
Unfortunately, using pre-made sound clips isn’t going to work for me. Without something like I described above, I’ll just have to do all of the editing by hand which will be painfully tedious.