Changing Autogenerated Label Names by Importing Text File

Audacity 3 Help Forum macOS
1

I need some help/advice on importing label names.

I have a series of audio files with native speakers reading phrases in Korean. The same phrase is read first by a male speaker and then by a female speaker. I use sound finder to identify and label each sentence. See screenshot. The labels are autogenerated in sequence (1, 2, 3, etc.). I would like to have the labels renamed as such:

Sentence 1 (male)
Sentence 1 (female)
Sentence 2 (male)
Sentence 2 (female)
Sentence 3 (male)
Sentence 3 (female)

I do not want to change the timestamps. I only want to rename the autogenerated labels as above.

I tired importing a .txt file with the preferred names, but it won’t import correctly unless I provide timestamps. In order to get timestamps, I would have to export the autogenerated labels to a .txt file, add my labels to the text file, and then reimport the .txt file to Audacity.

Is there an easy way to do this?
audacity.png

2

Nope, I don’t think so, sorry.

If I was going to do this I would do it exactly the way you have tried.

Peter.

3

Thanks for the reply. I had about 100 audio files, each file reading with two voices reading 11 sentences. Here’s how I ended up solving the problem.

  1. Imported all audio files into my Audacity project.
  2. Aligned all the tracks one after the other (Tracks > Align > End to End).
  3. Use sound finder to identify each sentence.
  4. Export the labels as a text file. This gave me all the time stamps for all files together as one.
  5. Use Excel and run formulas on the labels generated to create the desired labels.
  6. Save as a tab separated text file.
  7. Delete the auto generated labels in Audacity and import the text file I created with my desired labels.

It took about 15 minutes. Much faster than doing each file individually. Aligning the tracks end to end was the key. I didn’t know that feature existed. Of course, this wouldn’t work so well if the nature of your audio clips could not be aligned one after the other.

4

Thanks for posting this workflow solution - other users may find this useful :sunglasses: