Probably old stuff here. I have music on one track and I am narrating on the other. I want to edit some of the voice without affecting the music track. Not just silence it, but cut it. How do I do this without the music track also being cut?
Lynn
Use the drop-down menu on the left of the track > Split Stereo Track. Don’t use Split Stereo to Mono. If you just split, you should get two independent tracks that retain their “Left” and “Right” identity. When you’re done, Menu > Make Stereo Track.
If you start making one track shorter than the other, you could run into file format problems. I personally would jam some silence on the end of each of the split tracks and then cut them to the same length when you’re done.
Koz
A note. Putting music on one side and narration on the other is rough to listen to. Are you producing a Step-In-The-Middle and somebody else will produce the mixed show?
If you wanted to mix right now, then yes, Split Stereo To Mono and both tracks will play to left and right. They’ll Export mixed, too.
Koz
What I’m doing is laying down a music bed and then voicing radio style imaging. I want to edit some miss reads in the voice. It will go out as mono.
In that case you can reduce everything to mono. The music bed, Tracks > Stereo Track to Mono, and you can record your voice mono if the system will let you. If you need to split the performance, then yes, menus on the left > Split Stereo to Mono.
This should give you a series of mono tracks all independent of each other. You can SOLO and MUTE each one to see what you have with the tools on the left. They will accept corrections, filters, etc. When you File > Export, Audacity will smash them all together into one Mono performance.
It may be a little more challenging to do word-by-word corrections. If you select a point on an existing voice track and press Record, Audacity will create a new track at that point with your corrected recording on it. It’s up to you to carefully edit so your correction appears in the right place, and delete or silence the error. Audacity won’t do Crash-Record or Append Insert.
Koz
I’m very new to Audacity (and brand new on this forum). I’m having the same difficulty as above. I have a set of songs on one track and I recorded narration to be used between “sets” of songs (radio-style) on a separate track. Both mono (my preference). But when I go to edit the narration, it edits the music bed in track 1 as well. I imagine there’s a simple fix and the suggestions above didn’t seem to address it. Thanks for any suggestions!