"Mass editing" WAV files?

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1

Hello everyone

I have about 600 WAV files that I need to do a simple change to (convert from stereo to mono). Now, I’d like to change/edit and then overwrite all these files at once instead of doing each file individually, or at least do it in batches of 50 or 25 files. Audacity lets me do the change to mono on all tracks at once, but it seems I still have to re-export each one of them individually, with no option to just save, i.e. overwrite the original file. Is there anything I can do, or any other software that allows me to speed up this process? I use v2.1.1.

2

Audacity has batch-processing, was called chains. now called macros …
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/macros.html

SoX is free batch-processing software … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoX

3

Thank you. Getting the stereo to mono was simple, but what’s the command I have to put in to make Audacity automatically export and overwrite the source file?

4

Tip: before running this for real, test it with just a couple of files - you don’t want to be waiting a long time if you’ve made a mistake :wink:

  1. Upgrade to Audacity 2.3.3 (https://www.audacityteam.org/download/windows/)
  2. Create a “Macro” (https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/macros.html) containing these two commands:
Mix Stereo Down to Mono
Export as WAV
  1. Copy half of your files into a new folder (Macros can usually handle up to about 500 files. It should be able to handle 300 with ease.)
  2. Apply the macro to the 300 files. The “converted” files will be in a folder called “macro-output”
  3. Check that the output files are as expected before deleting the original files.
5

Worked liked a charm. Thanks very much.