Paste Special

[kozikowski]

I know there’s a way to do this, I just can’t find it.

Copy a big chunk of sound from a long track. Select a shorter portion of a second track and Paste, but the paste cuts to the length of the second track selection. The length of the second track doesn’t change.

Koz

[steve]

The phrase that pays: “Punch Copy Paste”

Copy a big chunk of sound from a long track. Select a shorter portion of a second track and Paste, but the paste cuts to the length of the second track selection. The length of the second track doesn’t change.

Also works the other way round:
Copy a short chunk of sound, select a longer portion of a second track and Paste, but the paste loops to the length of the second track selection.The length of the second track doesn’t change.

Punch Copy/Paste

A pair of plug-ins for simplifying “punch in” editing. Unlike the standard paste function in Audacity, the “punch” paste replaces the selected audio with just the right amount of pasted audio to match the duration of audio being replaced, thus the speed and timing of the track is not changed by pasting. These plug-ins were developed from a feature request on the forum (https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/alternate-equal-length-paste-command-resolved/28836/1) to streamline the work flow of replaci…

[kozikowski]

Writing that down.

Koz

[steve]

Perhaps “Paste Special” should be a built-in command rather than a plug-in? There do seem to be a lot of use cases where it is exceptionally useful.

[kozikowski]

Particularly the version that fades in the paste at both ends.
Koz