How to shift one track a few seconds?

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

Hi,

I have two tracks, one accompaniment and a solo. When I play them together, solo track doesn’t sync with accompaniment at beginning. Can some one please let me know how to shift solo track a bit? In Audacity’s Track menu, it seems we can do something but I couldn’t figure out how to do it.

I’m using Windows version 2.2.2.

Thanks & regards,
Lee

2

The Time Shift Tool in in the tool box is two sideways black arrows. Select that (and don’t forget you did). Click on the track and push sideways.

Did you perform overdubbing to get both backing and a performance on separate tracks? There’s a setting to make them overlay first time out so you won’t have to patch it together later.

The setting is Audacity > Edit > Preferences > Devices > Latency > Track…

What you do is go into overdub and play the backing track in your headphones and jam the headphones onto the microphone.

Measure how far off they are from each other are on the timeline and add or subtract that value to the correction value in that box. Everybody get this wrong the first time.

Keep jockying back and forth until you get it so you can play and can’t tell any miss.

If it never settles, pay attention to that. That’s a danger signal.

Koz

3

Thanks so much for your information. I’ll give it a try tomorrow.

Here is what I did…

I plug in an external mic to my laptop so I can use Audacity to record my sax play. But since there is only one jack on my laptop (it’s for headset with mic so either a mic or a headset can be plugged in this jack), I cannot connect my headset to laptop anymore. So I have to use my iPhone + headset to listen to accompaniment while playing sax. It’s hard to sync the recorded track with the accompaniment at beginning this way. That’s why I was looking for Audacity’s shift tool so I can manually sync both tracks together at beginning before combine them (export both tracks to a file). Any suggestions?

Thanks & regards,
Lee

4

https ://manual.audacityteam.org/man/time_shift_tool.html

5

Hi kozikowski and Trebor,

Thank you for your help. This issue was resolved with your information. Appreciate it!

Regards,
Lee