Merging files to one project.

[kitika]

Hi - I’ve been using Audacity for only a fortnight - to voice up a WW1 soldier’s diary - so far so good. I made each month a separate project and ended up with twelve files with corresponding aup files. Now I want to create one merged project with each month tagged to become a separate track on a planned CD. I created a new project and loaded the first (January) file in but when I came to load February, the January file disappeared (overwritten?). How do I merge all individual files into one project - preferably with all files on one set of tracks and not have each new file dropping down and creating another set of tracks? Any help much appreciated. PS - I’ve looked everywhere (I think) in the online manual and forum but see no hint about this problem.

[Gale_Andrews]

@kitika

Hi - I’ve been using Audacity for only a fortnight - to voice up a WW1 soldier’s diary - so far so good. I made each month a separate project and ended up with twelve files with corresponding aup files. Now I want to create one merged project with each month tagged to become a separate track on a planned CD. I created a new project and loaded the first (January) file in but when I came to load February, the January file disappeared (overwritten?). How do I merge all individual files into one project - preferably with all files on one set of tracks and not have each new file dropping down and creating another set of tracks? Any help much appreciated. PS - I’ve looked everywhere (I think) in the online manual and forum but see no hint about this problem.

You can’t merge projects into one, except by opening each project and cutting and pasting tracks into the single project.

If you want all the tracks as one, when you’ve pasted all the tracks, CTRL + A to Select All, then Tracks > Align Tracks > Align End to End, then Tracks > Mix and Render.

Audacity does not let you overwrite an existing, different project.


Gale

[steve]

@kitika

Now I want to create one merged project with each month tagged to become a separate track on a planned CD

For each CD track you will need a separate WAV file (your CD writing software will then load each file as a separate CD track).
So the way that I would do it is:

1. Export each project as a WAV file so that you have 12 WAV files.
2. Open a new project and import all 12 WAV files (they will appear one below the other).
3. Set the solo button behaviour to “Simple” (see: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/tracks_preferences.html)
4. Select All (Ctrl+A) and apply the Normalize effect (default settings, as shown here: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/normalize.html)
5. Use the track Solo buttons to switch from one track to another and check that they all sound about the same level. If some tracks are noticeably louder than others, find which track is the quietest, then use the track Gain sliders (see: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/audio_tracks.html#gain) to reduce the volume of the louder tracks so that they match the quietest track.
6. Export all of the tracks to a new folder using “Export Multiple” (“based on tracks”) - see: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/export_multiple.html
   Export in WAV format (default).
7. Use your CD burning software to create an audio CD. (some CD software defaults to “data CD”, which will play on computers but many CD players cannot play data CDs).

[Gale_Andrews]

If you still want the audio for the CD tracks as one Audacity track, you can label the points in the Audacity track where each CD track will start then Export Multiple by labels.


Gale