Best Way to Record Hundreds of Short Voice Files?

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1

Hi,

I have several projects – to help my kid memorize stuff, and some things I need to memorize for work – so I thought I’d get Audacity and tackle them. And I wonder if you could advise me on the best way to approach this, in terms of workflow.

I need to record several hundred short voice recordings around 4 - 10 seconds each. I need to read the info off a spreadsheet, like for my kids project it would look like this:
The capital of Idaho is …… Boise
The capital of Alaska is …… Juneau
The capital of Colorado is …… Denver
and so on.

I don’t care too much, at this point, what format they are recorded in. I suppose .ogg, .mp3, or .wav; and 10 years ago I had a program that could batch convert, so it probably doesn’t matter much anyway, since converting should be easy enough, isn’t it?

I want to the filenames to be:
State Capital Test -Idaho.wav
State Capital Test -Alaska.wav
State Capital Test -Colorado.wav
etc.

So what would be the most efficient way to attack this? I specifically do not want to have to type the file names every time. They are on the spreadsheet.

I could fairly easily create all the files (empty) with a batch file first, and then “save as” from Audacity, or is there some script version of Audacity that will allow me to record hundreds of times, rapid fire, like each file ends when I hit the ‘stop’ button?

Like this: ??? for example ???
audacityd.exe -record -wav -stop “State Capital Test -Idaho.wav”
audacityd.exe -record -wav -stop “State Capital Test -Alaska.wav”
audacityd.exe -record -wav -stop “State Capital Test -Colorado.wav”
I don’t know, just guessing.

Or if Audacity will just automatically sequentially name the files,
audacity0001.wav
audacity0002.wav
audacity0003.wav
audacity0004.wav
audacity0005.wav
audacity0006.wav
audacity0007.wav
audacity0008.wav
audacity0009.wav
I could write a batch file to just rename them. (or actually, I could just live with sequential names, to be honest.)

Or maybe there’s some Audacity plug-in to allow feeding in filenames? …

I’m running Windows
Win 7 x64
Vista x64
XP Pro

and I’m running a few Linuxes
Ubuntu 9
OpenSuse 12
Mint 12
Xubuntu 11

I just installed Audacity 2.0.1 on the Win 7 machine and I think it’s on the Xubuntu machine too. My first choice would be to do these projects on the Win 7 machine, but it’s not all that important.

thank you

2

The best way that I can think of (though there will be other methods).

  • Press Record
  • The capital of Idaho is …… Boise > Ctrl+M > Enter
  • The capital of Alaska is …… Juneau > Ctrl+M > Enter
  • …
  • Press Stop (or space bar)

This will create one audio track with a label between each section. (see here about label tracks: http://manual.audacityteam.org/manual/help/manual/man/label_tracks.html )
Then use “Export Multiple” to export each section as a separate, numbered WAV file. http://manual.audacityteam.org/manual/help/manual/man/export_multiple.html

3

This is awesome. It works great. I just use a batch file to rename them all. Thank you Steve!