I’m trying to create an audiobook. The whole thing is about 10 hours in length and what I’d like to do is break it up into (apx.) hour long tracks, but within each track I want “sub-tracks” of or “markers” at a useful 10-15 minutes. Is it possible to create “nested tracks” when exporting from Audacity? If not, does anyone have suggestions on how to go about creating such a file(s)? Do I need different software or to create some kind of metadata file apart from Audacity labels?
You obviously know about Audacity labels and their use in track creation - but no, as far as I am aware there is no way of creating the sub-tracks you require.
Yes, but as Koz is fond of pointing out - Audacity projects are not production files - theye are an audio development environment.
You really need to be exporting a set of WAV files or compressed MP3 files - for transfer to CD/iPod and MP3 player - and it the Audacity labels that determine the tracks - and there are no markers within tracks, are there?
I would much rather have 10 x 1 hour Audacity projects (leading to 60 x 10 minute WAV files) than 1 x 10 hour project (leading to 60 x 10 minute WAV files).
Handling and processing the files will be a lot quicker (though more repetitive), and in the event of an accident, the worst that could happen is loosing the work done on one chapter rather than the work done on the entire book.
I would organise it so that I had 10 folders on the computer, labelled “chapter01”, “chapter02”…“chapter10” (the leading zero so that chapter10 is listed after chapter09 alphabetically). Each folder would contain one Audacity project. Each Audacity project would have a label track so that WAV files of 10 minute duration can be exported.
The final book would then be compiled from the 10 minute audio clips from each chapter folder.
Makes good sense to me - I never like over-large projects myself as the processing time is far too long
An example was last weekend I set up a 1.5 hour timed recording - but Audacity failed to switch off - so I ened up with a project of over 9 hours. It took absolutely ages to just to trim it down to my actual require capture length.
So yes, I too would work with much shorter segments as Steve suggests.