Moving an individual beat within a track

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

I’m a fairly new with Audacity using W8.1 and ver: 2.0.6. I know my problem will have been covered in the manual but I just can’t find/understand the relevant bit! I think all this new stuff in one go has fused my brain!

I have recorded an acoustic guitar track (on a Zoom R8 recorder) and transferred it to Audacity along with some others. I’m really happy with it except for the few simple strums at the end. One of them is very slightly late. Everything I’ve read seems to be about aligning whole tracks etc which I’m fine with. But I would like to move this individual strum back slightly without moving the alignment of the rest of the track. I apologise is this is a daft/obvious question! A pointer to the part of the manual I should be looking at would do. :blush: Thanks!

2

These images show the easiest way - just delete a bit from just before the beat that is “late”. The labels are for illustration purposes only - you don’t need to create labels.
tracks000.png
tracks001.png
tracks002.png

3

Thanks for the reply Steve, I really appreciate it. :slight_smile: I think I tried that method once before but when I deleted the small section in front of the track it pulled everything afterwards along too so all the rest of the track (that was ok before) was then wrong and only the single altered beat was right! Is there a way of highlighting and dragging only the bit you want to move?

Anyway, I was going to try it out again on a duplicate track earlier but now Audacity seems to have completely crashed and lost everything! I don’t know what’s happened since it was fine earlier but I get error messages saying it can’t find the files etc when I try and open it. It seems to have lost the whole project and even a couple of other backups I had kept at different stages. I think I still have the files on my recorder so no real harm done but I had got it more or less perfect! Is there anything I can try to rescue it?

4

If you need the later audio to stay in place, it is a harder task.
You will need to first move the “late” strum to the left as described in my previous post, and then stretch that strum to make it longer so that it pushes the later audio back into place. Use the “Sliding Time Scale / Pitch Shift” effect to stretch the strum.

5

Thanks for that Steve, exactly what I was after. :smiley: