i don’t know the audacity terminology to search for this so i’m asking here. tried to find it in the manual but didn’t know what to look for.
there is a vertical line that appears across a clip when i split it. if i split at the cursor, i get a single line at the cursor position. if i split it at a selected time range, i get a vertical line at either end of the split range. what confuses me is that, if i click on one of these lines, it disappears. what are these lines? how do people use them? they seem oddly ephemeral to me.
i’d have thought that by splitting the clip i was creating a new, smaller clip and that the lines were defining its edges. the fact that the lines disappear when clicked, though, implies to me that a new, smaller clip has not been defined.
Terminology first, then hopefully it will all start to make sense:
That vertical line is called a “split line”. When you split a track like this, the track audio is split into two “audio clips”. Each “clip” is a separate piece of audio with a start and an end.
Yes.
Splitting a track with one “split line” creates two “audio clips”. One to the left of the split line and one to the right.
Splitting a track with a “region” selected creates two split lines. The track becomes three “audio clips” - one on the left, one on the right, and one between the two split lines.
Clicking on a split line “joins” the adjacent clips (removes the split line so that the two adjacent clips join to create a larger single clip).
Usually it is so that sections of a track can be moved with the Time Shift Tool.
Try this:
Generate a 30 second tone (“Generate” menu)
Click near the middle of the track to place the cursor position at around 15 seconds.
thanks, steve. this helps clarify things. i’ll move on to some greater detail now.
i have track 1 and it has a lot of splits on it, some long clips, some short. one of my tasks is to go through track 1 and delete extraneous clips. when i do this, by double-clicking the clip and hitting the ‘delete’ key, the selected clip deletes and the clips to the right move up fill the gap left by the absence of the originally selected clip. so far, so good.
i find that, if i have a long clip to delete, and it’s followed by a lot of shorter clips, the right boundary of the deleted clip remains on the timeline, imposed over some wholly other clip that has been moved up by the deletion.
what do i make of that?
is it actually doing anything?
can i just click it to get rid of it?
does clicking it perform any audio action or is it only graphical in nature?
can i make it not keep the old clip’s right boundary marking? it’s more work to chase it down and delete it. would be nice to not have it there without having to take action.
to be accurate, this is a replacement, not a simple deletion. in this case, the idea is to replace a longer clip with a shorter one.
this is the selected region to replace:
and this is after the replacement:
note that the end boundary of the deleted clip is still marked. (screen grabs are of slightly different sizes so the alignment of the boundary end is not perfect in the image.)
the macro stores the selection on track 0, selects track 2, defines and copies a piece of that track, then retrieves the saved selection and pastes the piece of track 2 into track 0 in place of the original selection. when finished, it leaves the original end boundary marker in place on the timeline.
(i recently added the last two lines in the macro because the end of the pasted region was not indicated with a vertical black line. sending the cursor to that boundary and splitting added the line.)
In your first image, the first split is around 41.8 and the second split around 43.7
In the second image, the section from 41.8 to 43.7 has been replaced with audio that is 0.75 seconds long. So now the first two splits are around 41.8 and 42.55.
It appears that the selection after pasting is still from 41.8 to 43.7, so when your script says:
thanks, steve. that’s all right but look at this. the end boundary of the selected clip is marked at 43.7(ish). i’ve also pointed out that the audio in the clip that follows is unbroken.
here, there is still a mark at 43.7. why? the clip that it referenced is gone. note that it now indicates a split in second clip’s audio, a split i never placed.
It appears that the selection after pasting is still from 41.8 to 43.7
that’s not what i get here. when i run the macro with those last two lines here, i get a split at 42.55. without those last two lines, no split at 42.55. in both cases, i get a split at 43.7.
in the macro, the paste command ends by showing a selection of 750ms but does not put a split line at the end of the 750ms. that’s why i added the last two lines of the macro.
i would have expected the paste command to have placed split lines at the start and end of the pasted 750ms, and to have removed the one at 43.7 since that clip is now gone. in replacing the longer clip, i’d have expected the new clip to be marked as it is pasted and the removed clip to take its marks with it when it leaves.
without adding two lines to the macro, i get a 750ms clip that has no tail split line and a following clip that has a split i didn’t want.
looks like your 10-15sec selection is not split before running the macro. what happens if, rather than just selecting from 10-15secs, you split track1 at 10secs, split at 15secs, select by double-clicking the resultant 5sec clip, then run the macro?
thanks, steve. that’s what i was going to try next, deleting before pasting. just tried it and it does work. adds a step but it’s a short macro so seems fine.
edit:
actually, though, it seems like i can get rid of the last two lines this way which makes it one line shorter.
