Hello, working on my first project in Audacity. I am a little baffled by how cut-and-paste works. Current example, I would like to edit a mistake in the guitar track but I cannot find a way to cut and paste only in one track. Also cut and paste tends to move all the rest of the audio in the file seemingly at random. Is there a way to make the audio stay in its original position rather than move around when I cut part of the track out? Is there a way to make it edit on only one track? Love the program but so far I have not found a way around this problem. Thank you very much for any insight!
I cannot find a way to cut and paste only in one track.
You mean the left or right side of a stereo track?
You can [u]Split Stereo Track[/u] and then you’'ll be able to edit the left & right tracks separately.
Also cut and paste tends to move all the rest of the audio in the file seemingly at random.
If you don’t want to affect the timing you can mute the parts you want to replace (Generate → Silence).
Then if you put the replacement part in another track (File → Import → Audio or Tracks → Add New) the two tracks will mix so you can just mute the parts of each track that you don’t want included in the mix.
And you might want to make a crossfade to make a smooth splice (fading-in, fading-out, and overlapping). The crossfade can be a few milliseconds or longer. Whatever works better.
See this page in the manual on selecting audio.
Make sure that Tracks (menu) > Sync-lock tracks is not checked.
– Bill