I’ve discovered recently that Audacity is capable to handle multiple clips in a track; according to the manual, those ones are sections of an audio track that can be moved either within the current track or to another one. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it was supposed that a clip is any sound inside a track and when there are more than a single clip in that track, those clips share the track’s properties such as volume or pan. This is useful for example when mixing voices or percussions without having a separate track for each sound.
However, it looks like the things on Audacity are different. I tried to create a clip from an audio selection as explained on the manual by selecting the option clip boundaries > Split. It works, but I don’t see any difference (literally) so the tracks are the same and the sound is unaltered. It says that this feature does nothing in a track, except splitting it into multiple clips. But how can I notice each clip? I cannot neither join clips.
Note that I’m working with a screen reader, so if this feature is not accesible for it, please tell me. I’m alright working the way I do, but I’m searching for improve my skills on this. I’d like to learn about clips as well.
Ah yeah, I had forgotten to read it before posting this. I remembered that the envelope tool and the time shift tool were not accessible with screen readers, but I thought it wasn’t the case about clips.
So taking into account this limitation, do you think we the blind people are missing a useful feature? Or do you consider that we can work fine without it?
Yes, there are a lot of features that decrease our productivity due to absence.
For clips: I use “Split New” which will move the selection as a clip into a new track.
Thus you can select the track and jump with j and k to the clip boundaries or select it if you use Shift+k instead.
Development-wise, a possible improvement could be made by letting jump and select clips by using tab (next) and shift-tab (previous). That’s already the case with labels.
In fact, the latter could be used in this way if it were possible to turn auto-edit off.
I do believe that your suggestion is quite good, and due to this it could be even possible to make things more accessable for us; frankly by adding some commands and other stuff the workplace might be better than before, though for some devs accessibility is not that important like fixing bugs and such. I’m not worried about it 'cause Audacity is very good the way it is today, just this is a small comment from my part.
I had no idea about what you said regarding to the labels (which is another unusable feature for us unless we put in practice the method you described above) so might take a look to discover how it works.
Now, changing a little bit the subject and so avoiding not to make another post , I came up with another question: is it possible to split a recording into smaller parts with Audacity besides of selecting and clicking the option file > save as? I’m not too lazy to this way, just I’m interested in mastering Audacity as most as I can.
How exactly do you want to split?
‘Save as’ is reserved for projects and that’s most likely not what you meant–it’s rather ‘Export Selected Audio’.
Splitting is usually done with labels…
But again, do you want to e.g split an album into individual songs and export them as Wav or Mp3?
Let’s say that I’d like to, for example, make a voice recording which contains spoken numbers ranging from 0 to 10. Then what I’d like to do is to select each individual number to split one another, meaning that the final results will be 10 mp3 files corresponding to every number from the previous recording.
Something just like that is what I’m interested in achieving…
The proper export command will be “Export Multiple”. You can select if the files should be created by labels or by tracks.
We’ve already seen that individual tracks can be created through the Edit->Clip Boundaries->Split New command.
My key combination is Ctrl-i for it.
Import the track
Select all (Ctrl-a)
play
set cursor and stop (left bracket then space or shift-a to do it in one go)
control the cursor position with Shift-F6 and Shift-F7.
split new
press enter to deselect the first track and move down to the next track.
resume playback and repeat the last steps until you’re done.
You can now align all tracks with time zero although I’m not sure if it is necessary for export (tracks menu).
You could alternatively cut the audio with Ctrl-x, deselect the current track and paste with Ctrl-v.
This pastes in a new track (if none is selected) at time 0. However, you have to mute the previous tracks and that’s not convenient either.
Second possibility: using labels.
Let the audio play and press Ctrl-m to mark a split point.
(After typing in a name,) Press enter and then stop with space.
Resume play and insert the next “mark”.
The label text which functions as file name can later in the label editor be entered or corrected (tracks menu).
Last but not least, the Analyze menu has sound and silence finder which create the labels automatically.
Tab and shift-tab jump through the labels if the focus is on such a track. However, it is tricky to play and stop due to the mentioned automatic edit mode.
Actually most developers (and we don’t have many) don’t much enjoy or look forward too big-fixing
And be assured Accessibility for VI users is a key strand in the project and something we try to achieve - but our (mostly) volunteer worksforce is quite limited in numbers and spare-time availability
so the tracks are the same and the sound is unaltered. It says that this feature does nothing in a track, except splitting it into multiple clips. But how can I notice each clip? I cannot neither join clips.
, I came up with another question: is it possible to split a recording into smaller parts with Audacity besides of selecting and clicking the option file > save as? I’m not too lazy to this way, just I’m interested in mastering Audacity as most as I can.
