Did you try to select all together, and then issue the “Join” command? Probably Ctrl-J on a Windows computer.
I import all 17 at the same time. When I OPEN them, the progress bar does not show the entire files being opened…… I then select all, align tracks end to end, mix and render, then export.
I do not see Options Preferences-trackstrack behavior anywhere
Snapping toolbar is activated
I have deactivated it.
Screenshots.
Now, when I Mix and Render, the tracks still shown broken as when aligned….. they used to combine into 1 track…..
How do I go back to the earlier version?
Went back to V.2.1.2.
Close as I can get.
Now, when I go to export as mp3, I an informed that Audacity needs an mp3 encoder, and says Click here to download LAME. When do that I get some Audacity reference page, NO mention of LAME…
I am not able to download and use LAME…all the instructions say that it is included with Audacity. Just beaten at every turn…..
There is not enough time to suffer with this level of frustration.
I am done trying to save these audiobook files.
I no longer have the discs or I would just rip as one track and be done with it……………..
Wouldn’t that join incomplete tracks?
Why are you jumping from one method to the other? Follow one recommendation and report whether it works or not - if it doesn’t work, even with the help of the person who gave the recommendation, you can then switch and try another method.
I recommended to use the “Join” command - did you try it? It works if you put all recordings in the same “track” (track ≠ individual songs / chapters of audiobooks). You have all pieces in different tracks. Use copy / paste to get them into the same track, then shift around and join. I have no odea what “incomplete tracks” is for you.
I can not help with old versions since I do not want to install them. So I am out of this discussion.
LAME for Audacity can (or could) be found on the website lame.buanzo.org.
If I remember rightly, the older Audacity versions couldn’t include LAME due to copyright issues. It’s now bundled with Audacity because the copyright expired some time ago. If you are likely to use Audacity in future, I’d stick with a recent version to remove the headache of finding a suitable LAME encoder and take advantage of the newer features.
Since we now know you don’t have the original CDs, it’s clear you cannot rip them again with dBPoweramp. Using some MP3s of my own I could join them together in Audacity but it was ungainly. Essentially, I imported all the tracks, dragged each one to the end of the previous one, selected them all and joined them. Once I did that, I exported the whole thing as an MP3.
Since I am allergic to faffing around, I tried using my favourite Plan-B program, Ocenaudio to do it. It was MUCH easier. Open Ocenaudio, click File > Open or Ctrl-O and select all the individual tracks. Wait while they load. They will be listed in the side panel. Make sure they are in the right order. Click the first track and Shift-Click the last one to highlight them all. Right-click anywhere in the highlighted list and then click Join from the resulting menu.
This will create a new track called ‘Join of…’. Right-click the new track and choose Export. Choose MPEG from the next menu. Click Export. You should now have a new mp3 file called ‘Join of…’ with all the tracks in it. After renaming it to a better name, test it in your car and see if it works. If it does, rinse and repeat.
Best of luck!
I had used V2.1.0 some years ago. When I read about an mp3 merging procedure using Audacity, I tried it and it worked. But, I didn’t know that the files were being exported as .wav until I put them on an flash drive…. it filled up VERY quickly. So I went to the current version. All seemed to be good until I played the combined rile. 1+ hour files played for 6 minutes, then moved ahead t the next track/CD.
I had previously merged each CD’s worth of files and moved to a separate sub folder in the folder for that particular audiobook. For the files that did not play correctly, I skipped doing that, basically putting the entire 7 discs worth into 1 file. I believe that is where I went wrong.
So, I went back to V.2.1.2 and things opened, aligned and merged properly, but I could not convert to ,mp3 to export. I downloaded LAME, but could not get Audacity to find it to convert………probably due to my limited computer abilities.
Now I am back to the current version of Audacity. All is working properly, once I place each CD’s tracks into their own sub folder.
I used Audacity because I had read a “how-to” online to do what I wanted,and, since I already had Audacity, I gave it a go. Since I read that I did not look foe other, simpler programs to do this… I seem to have the knack for using very capable programs for the experts, and attempting to do simple tasks…….
The procedure, again, is: IMPORT AUDIO (select computer files and open) , SELECT all, ALIGN end-to-end, MIX and Render, then export. I move each combined file to its own sub-folder in the folder for the proper audiobook, then use am mp3 editor to give each disc a name, author, and disc sequence number.
As I really only have 1 AB or 2 that were ripped but no longer have the discs, I will go back to ripping to 1 track using dbP if further difficulties are incurred.
Thanks to all!
I have started using Free Online Audio Joiner from soundtools. Super simple… import the tracks and, once loaded, hit merge and export. That’s it ! Once done, move from the download folder to your destination file of choice. wow…..
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A person could also use ffmpeg to concatenate all the audio into one mp3 file.
But we use the tools we are familiar with, as long as they get the task done.
I had to look concatenate up! Thanks for the tip…
I have completed my project using both Audacity and that other program (it limited the number of imported tracks to 50, and I had some audiobooks with 99 tracks/disc!)
Any additional AB’s will be ripped to 1 track from the CD.
Thanks to all !
To quote General Douglas MacArthur, “These proceedings are now closed.”
Hey, if you like concatenate then you will also like contiguous.
Yup. I knew that one…
Or if, like me, you like a spot of obfuscation, how about unified, serially conjoined audio file segments? 
That is precisely what I get when I employ TRACKS-Align-End-to-End !
Those Soundtools seem like a good find. I was sceptical at first because I assumed you would have to upload something to a remote site AND register. It turns out I was wrong on both counts.
Everyone here knows how much I like to post a “well, actually” reply.
On computer operating systems these days, a concatenated file will not be contiguous. Simultaneous multitasking means that pieces of the file will be scattered about in pieces on the storage medium.
Even when you optimize a hard drive, the physical magnetic media is broken up into sectors with checksums. The only contiguous files I know of are on optical drives.
I’ve recently been working with multiple tracks, and I have to use “select all” before clicking “align tracks.” Then I have to “select all” AGAIN before I click “mix and render.” Did you “select all” between aligning the tracks and doing the mix and render?
No. I Align End to End, then Mix and Render without clicking “select all” again between operations…