We have been using Audacity for 8-9 years for our educational software. Our voice artist has recorded dozens of hours of voices, and those get split up into small files that our software then plays. An example would be, the voice artist recites the alphabet and then each letter in the alphabet is now it’s own file. They do a similar thing with spelling lists, so each word is it’s own file.
Our issue is that the quality was not great in the beginning, we had cheap microphones and poor recording techniques. We’d like to rerecord many of our files. However, we don’t want to touch our software, so we want to rerecord each file and overwrite them so our software doesn’t have to be touched.
Any ideas on how to make this easier? Ideally the artist can simply record each file and tap a key to save/overwrite, and then the next one just pops up, and then keep repeating.
I would strongly recommend not directly overwriting the original files. If a mistake is made you could lose all of your original recordings.
Better to create new files, then after checking that they are correct, and ensuring that you have a backup copy of the originals, overwrite the originals with the new files.
One possible approach would be to make a list of the file names.
(I assume that the file names match the contents of the files, for example, the file “a.wav” contains a recording of the letter “a”. If that’s not the case then the task is a bit more tricky, but you could still use a similar approach.)
You then record a series of letters / words / phrases, and add a label for each file (Label Tracks - Audacity Manual)
Then you “Export Multiple” based on labels (Exporting multiple audio files - Audacity Manual)
The arduous part of this method is that you will need to either manually add names to each label, or bulk rename the exported files.
An alternative to manually naming the files, would be to “split” the recording at the end of each file (Edit Menu: Audio Clips - Audacity Manual), and use Nyquist to convert a list of file names into labels for each audio clip. For example, this code may be run in the “Nyquist Prompt” (Nyquist Prompt - Audacity Manual) to add labels to selected clips:
;type analyze
;control names "Paste list of file names" string "" "alpha beta gamma"
(let ((clips (get '*track* 'clips))
(names (eval-string (format nil "'(~a)" names))))
(cond
((/= (length clips)(length names))
(format nil "Error.~%~
Number of clips (~a) does not match~%~
the number of file names"))
(t (let ((labels ())
(i 0))
(dolist (clip clips labels)
(push (append clip (list (string (nth i names))))
labels)
(incf i))))))