One feature that would really benefit me is the ability to add silence (of differing durations) to multiple tracks all at the same time, all through a single interface.
Let me tell you what I would use it for so you can understand the functionality I’m asking for. I often make composite sounds out of different, individual sounds. A hi hat pattern out of 3-8 different hi hat samples, a keyboard/synth chord/riff out of different notes etc. So I’ll have multiple tracks in a single window, tracked in the order I want from top to bottom. Then I’ll use Generate Silence to advance each track by a specified amount. Sometimes it’s all by the same amount (say, a quarter note, or 500 ms in 120 bpm), so track 1 is 500 ms, track 2 is 1 second, track 3 is 1.5 seconds etc. But sometimes it’s widely varying, like 125 ms for track 1, then 250 ms for track 2, then 375 ms for track 3 etc. Then when they’re all in their appropriate positions, I Mix and Render. The results can be really fantastic, but let me tell you, it’s really slow going sometimes.
So what would be nice is if I could “tell” Audacity to do it all for me! Based on what I now know about Nyquist prompts, I think that would actually be ideal, because I think it would allow me to input data from Excel, so it would be completely customizable.
So it might work something like – Track 1, generate 250 ms silence starting at zero. Track 2, generate 125 ms silence starting at zero. Track 3, generate 500 ms silence starting at zero – you get the picture. That way I can have Excel do all the calculations for me in different cells, I concatenate into the proper Nyquist-friendly formatting, I throw that text into a Nyquist prompt (along with whatever other code I would need to add) and presto! All the silences are generated.
It would be nice if it could operate on a top down basis (top track = 1, second track = 2 etc). But if I had to input the track name into Excel to make it work, that would also be doable (though somewhat cumbersome as I’ll often have more than one of the same track in the window).
It also might be nice to have the option of changing the dB level of each track by the same method (inputting it from Excel). And maybe panning too (i.e. be able to inpit a +/- dB value for left and right channels). But I don’t want to get greedy.
Thanks for considering my request.