Hello,
I want to first thank the Audacity people for providing a high-quality song editing program that is actually free! Thank you! My problem today, though, is needing to call up a vertical line, as needed, to help me line up tracks that are copied over from another file so that everything is in perfect sync. I would expect there is such a tool, but I can’t find it nor know what it is called.
The vertical line that comes up when I hit “pause” would suffice, except that no editing can be done while in pause mode!
If you are transferring a multi-track project from a DAW into Audacity, ensure that all exported tracks start at time = 0 (pad the beginnings with silence if necessary).
So for me, I use Ctrl+B to create a label at a point of interest. Then when aligning tracks a yellows snap line appears which allows me to line up the beginning or end of a clip. audacity manual yellow line - Google Zoeken
Thanks for all the help, but none of these answers resolve the problem. What I need is a fixed vertical line at a place and time that I choose, which goes across all tracks and does not disappear whenever another part of the screen is touched. This is a useful tool that was in my Presonus Studio One software, but I lost the program key for that software while moving. I discovered the Audacity free recording software through a friend and am very happy with it, but I would like to recommend to the Audacity company that this feature be added, for it is glaring omission which prevents me from lining tracks up, perfectly, especially tracks that do not have the same starting point (fragments, etc). And what I’m trying to do is not something that can be “eyeballed.” It has to be accurate to within 1/50th of a second, I imagine, and one could spend weeks trying to get that level of accuracy when you’re making wild guesses in the dark, as is the case when there is no vertical line tool. I hope this explains the problem, thanks!
a fixed vertical line at a place and time that I choose, which goes across all tracks and does not disappear whenever another part of the screen is touched.
I remember this. All the above solutions come and go, modify, shift, and change depending on where the edit takes you. You want a mark or indicator that only changes when you change it, not environment dependent. It’s welded to the time track.
Remember my constant complaints about Audacity not having video Mark-In and Mark-Out. No, that’s not the same as Labels and the other tools. In this case, it’s a mark or indicator that is welded to the content in a track, no matter what else happens or where the edit goes.
Koz,
What are you talking about? Did you answer the question or provide a solution? I can’t figure it out. All I’m seeing is word salad. Sorry to put it that way, but could you be more clear? Tell me Yes or No, is what I seek, even possible with the Audacity software?
Did you answer the question or provide a solution?
Neither one. Both of those problems depend on Audacity being able to manage graphics linked to the sound edit. That’s insanely difficult on a software program that runs on multiple operating systems across multiple languages.
Okay, then. Thanks for answering. I hope someone from Audacity sees this and provides this feature in the next release. It was standard with Presonus Studio One recording software, so, that proves that it can be done. All that is needed is the will to try. Thanks again!
This thread is pretty old but I’d still like to add something in case someone else who needs this stumbles on it.
What OP is trying to do exactly is not 100% clear to me but I might have a working solution if the use case is the following: Let’s say you record a recording of a talk that spans two files, file1 and file2. In principle the recordings are such that file2 continues where file1 left off but with some small overlap, say 10 seconds, to ensure there is no gap in the recording. If you want to combine these two audio files into a single audio file which will be such that it seems like the whole talk was recorded in one go, you can do the following.
The key idea: is to span the vertical playback line / playhead across both tracks. You can then drag either of the clips to align with the other one.
Normally the playback line will appear on one track at the time where you click. This makes that track the active track / current selected track, you can then include the other track into the active selection by clicking on its left menu bar while holding shift. Now the playhead will span both tracks and you can drag time clips without the vertical line to disappear. If this was not clear, here is a step by step breakdown:
Import files. import file1 and file2 into Audacity on track 1 and track 2 respectively.
Line up approximately. Line up the overlapping region of track 1 and track 2 approximately. Either by eyeballing and/or using knowledge how long the interval of the overlap should be.
Zoom in. Zoom in to your wanted level of accuracy. You might have to do this in steps, shifting the clips to keep alignment sufficiently good. You can go all the way until you see individual sampling points.
Choose reference point. Click at a specific point in time on either one of the tracks which you’ll use as a reference point to get the alignment exactly right. Could be the peak of a wave or a line where it crosses the horizontal 0 line. This creates the vertical playback cursor / playhead on that track and it also makes the track you clicked on the active track (I don’t know if this is what you call it).
Include other track in selection. Now comes the trick. You can add the other track to what is ‘active’ by holding shift and clicking somewhere on the left menu bar of the other track. Now the vertical playhead spans both tracks which makes it easier to see how the tracks are aligned.
Drag to align. Now you can drag / shift either of the audio clips to perfectly align with the other one.
If this is not what you want but you want something similar, know that you can also store the position of your cursor (under Select) such that you can later go back to it. Also using labels might help as already suggested. You can snap to labels. But labels are fixed in time and can not be fixed to a time clip as far as I know.
