I’m part of a small team that use Audacity to edit the audio of an old TV show. I realised pretty quickly that I need to test the sync and that meant exporting the audio, muxing it to the video and watching it… a tedious process so I put together a Mac app that use mod-script-pipe - you load a video to the little app, load the audio to Audacity and press sync and from then on when you use a keyboard shortcut it will play the audio and video in sync, wherever you select on your Audacity timeline. We’ve been using this tool for a month and it’s become a big timesaver and works really well compensating for any drift and keeping things nicely in sync.
I’m not a professional developer by any stretch and had to use Codex to help get it over the line sadly but the more I use it, the more I think that other people out there might want it. Is there a way to send a feature request to the Audacity team for something similar or I can send them the app and see if it’s something they’d like to offer to people? Since I don’t have an Apple developer account and am no expert, I don’t think I can offer it to people as there may be security risks involved with unsigned apps from a random guy but it’s something I find really valuable and I think it would be really great if I could get it to the team here to review and maybe build in.
Thanks
EDIT: Link to it in action: https://youtu.be/pfJj1kt7_Ro
When it starts and stops is me pressing the hot key combo ctrl+opt+space - I then move the start position in Audacity and go again and the video shows from the new point in the timeline.
This app sounds interesting. Do you have a GitHub account?
If you don’t know, GitHub is a massive repository of new software. The Audacity source code is hosted on GitHub, as are millions of other projects. Hosting open source projects on GitHub is free.
If you want to share your app freely with the world, opening a GitHub account and creating a “repository” on GitHub for you project is a great way to start. Comprehensive documentation for GitHub is available here: GitHub Docs and if required, AI is likely to be able to guide you.
Once your project is on GitHub, you can post a link here to the repository.
So that you can see what a repository link looks like, here is the link (as plain text) to the Audacity repository: https://github.com/audacity/audacity
Tip: To avoid email spam, always use the free GitHub email address as your contact address for the project.
I’m not sure what you mean by timecode generators but basically the app matches the timecode from Audacity every time you hit the keyboard shortcut (ctrl+option+space) to start stop the audio and video at the same time, moving the video cursor to the same point. I’ll make a video of it in action so people can see how it works. The only prep that is needed is to ensure mod-script-pipe is enabled (followed by restarting Audacity) and then to ensure you have your audio file and video loaded in the respective apps before clicking sync.
How does it synchronize the video after you delete a section of the audio? If it is not with a timecode, is it by matching up the waveform? If so, that is great, because most people can’t afford timecode generators on every camera and recorder.
Oh I see what you mean… no it currently doesn’t do that. It assumes that the audio and video are the same length. Perhaps niche but the point of the app is to be able to edit audio while keeping everything in sync - not to edit audio and video at the same time. It was made for a specific purpose, ie removing stock music from a TV show so actual music can be edited in. This doesn’t mess with the length of the audio at all.
Edit: Had a think… when I have time I will explore the potential for a second mode without changing the behaviour of the current mode.
It might not need timecode. It could use the audio recorded in the video itself as a reference and match it against the Audacity audio though that could be messy relying on waveforms and stuff. Much to think about but intriguing for sure! I just find it hard to see the use case for it myself - if the audio is being chopped up then what is it being kept in sync for?
If you end up wanting to do that, I recommend a program called DaVinci Resolve. It has both a video and an audio editor. Once the video tracks and the audio tracks are placed on a timeline they are by default locked together. It has a function to align the tracks by either timecodes or waveforms (when the video has audio).
The program is used by movie studios, but there is a free version that has pretty much the same basic functions, just without any support. It is much, much, much more difficult to learn than Audacity is.
Oh right, well maybe I will give it a go and see how it progresses. Sounds like it would be a big update that would take a while so who knows. Anyway, I added a video link to the first post showing what this does.