This plugin helps you to easily join any of your clips, while removing any gaps between them and shifting any following clips over. It’s also easy to undo one or more of the joined clips.
Older versions of Audacity had the click-to-join feature, which allowed you to join clips by clicking on the split line between clips. This feature would also remove any tiny (< 10ms) gap from between clips and shift any following clips over. If the gap were larger than 10ms then it would not join the clips.
In the newer versions of Audacity, the official method for joining clips is to select the clips you want to join and then use ctrl-j to Join the clips, which also converts any gaps into silent samples. If you didn’t want those silences then you would need to manually remove any gaps from between the clips before joining them.
The Join Clips plugin helps to fill in the gap left by the removal of that click-to-join feature. This plugin will remove any size of gap between clips before joining them, and shift the following clips over. But unlike the official Join method, this plugin won’t convert gaps into silences. And unlike that old removed method, this plugin is activated via shortcut key instead of via mouse click. But… see the Tips below for how to use this plugin via a mouse click.
JoinClips.ny (5.7 KB) (v1.0.0) (requires Audacity v3.6 or newer)
Using the Join Clips plugin:
After you have installed and enabled the plugin it will appear on the Tools menu. For convenience you could assign a shortcut key to quickly run Join Clips.
There are two ways to select which clips are being joined:
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Place the cursor in or near the split or gap between clips, and run the plugin. This will join a single split. For speed of use, this method will not show a popup message when it’s done.
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You can select any number of clips to join at once, including on multiple tracks. After the plugin has run, it will show a popup message telling you how many were joined.
Tips
Here is a small AutoHotkey routine that can be added into your AutoHotkey.ahk file. This will allow you to alt-click near a split to join it. Bam! ![]()
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Before you alt-click near a split, make sure the mouse cursor is the Selection cursor, and not any other cursor, otherwise the track cursor won’t be located properly for the Join.
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You can keep holding down the alt key while you click on each split to join it, and then let go of the key when you’re done.
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This code snippet assumes that you’ve assigned Shift+J as the shortcut key for the Join Clips plugin, in the Audacity preferences.
#IfWinActive ahk_exe audacity.exe
!LButton::
Click
Send {SHIFTDOWN}j{SHIFTUP}
return
#IfWinActive
For extra easy joining via keyboard, assign a simple shortcut key to the Join Clips plugin, like Shift+J. Also assign shortcut keys for the Transport > Cursor to > Previous Clip Boundary and Next Clip Boundary commands, maybe using the keys Shift+[ and Shift+]. This allows you to quickly jump between any splits or gaps and join the ones that need it.
For even more extra easy joining via keyboard, and when you have a sequence of smaller clips to join, you can often join them one-by-one by running the plugin once for each split, via its shortcut key, but without the need for placing the cursor each time, as long as the cursor is near enough to each split that you’re joining. Compared to selecting a bunch of clips to join at once, this method gives you time to inspect each split before joining it.