(And sorry for my English mistakes in this message…)
My question is probably very basic, but I often encounter the same problem and I would like to work around it.
I work on Audacity with several recorded tracks themselves containing several sound fragments calibrated with respect to each other.
Sometimes I want to add a fragment to a track or move several without moving all of my work.
So I would like to know if, firstly, it is possible to add a sound fragment (with a copy / paste for example) without moving the other fragments (I know that I can always add a new track, but sometimes I will make you win time by not doing it).
And if, on the other hand (and above all), there is a quick way to select and move all the tracks AFTER a specific point, in order to be able to move without moving the fragments that are before the selection point (when I do a selection of a point at the end, very often, I also select the tracks that start BEFORE my selection point, and I don’t want to).
When you paste audio into a track, it is either:
a) Inserted at the cursor position (When there is no “audio selection”)
b) If there is an audio selection, then the pasted audio replaces the audio in the selection.
To insert some audio into a track without changing the times of later clips, you have to ensure that exactly the correct length is select in the destination track.
Example:
If you have copied 5 seconds of audio and you want to paste it into a track between 10 to 15 seconds, select the region from 10 to 15 seconds first, then paste.
In real life, selecting the exact amount of audio is not always so easy, but there’s a little trick that makes it easier:
Copy the audio that you want to paste.
Add a new audio track
Paste the audio into the new track (At this point, the pasted audio is selected)
Press “Enter” to deselect the audio
Press “Up” cursor (focus moves the the track above)
Press “Enter” to select the region in the destination track
Paste (Ctrl + V)
(Optional) Click the [X] in the top left corner of the empty track to delete it.
Thank you for your reply. I found another tip even simpler, by searching in the parameters of Audacity, it is possible to remove the displacement of the audios when making a collage. (which is very practical …).
I still have my problem to select and move the tracks. Do you have an idea ?
I am trying to make a “mixtape”. I have one project with three tracks that overlay each other, so I must move them as a group. I have another project with the song I want to come before the group. I am trying to move those three tracks all at the same time to the end of the first song. But only one track moves at a time. I select all three, hold SHIFT and Time Shift, but only one moves. I’ve selected all three and NOT held SHIFT and only one moves. Now, when I SELECT ALL and import those three tracks into the other project, they stay properly overlaid, so they import as one group. I’ve tried putting the cursor at the end of the first song, and importing the group to start where the cursor is, but that doesn’t work. I can move all FOUR tracks together, as a group. But I simply cannot get just the selected tracks to move as a group.
Select across all of the tracks that you want to move.
Switch to the Time Shift tool
click on a track inside the selected area and drag.
Note that if you click and drag from outside of the selected area, the clips will not move together.
Thank you, but I can do that if only the tracks I want to move are in the open project. But let’s say that in that demonstration, there were more tracks, and you only wanted to move those three, keeping those three synced how they are, just moving them as a block of three to the end of a fourth track. That’s what I can’t seem to do.
I was a little curious as to how this worked and did not work. I at first tried selecting a track then Ctrl-Clicking additional tracks. Even when I did this with only two non-sequential tracks it only seemed to move the first one.
To shift multiple tracks to left or right, there must be a selection region in all the tracks you want to time shift, and you must drag from inside the selection region in one of those tracks.
So, I created a five-track project. With the Selection Tool (F1) selected, I clicked at the one-second mark on the first track, then at the 3-second mark on the third track and at the 5-second mark on the fifth (last) track. I noted that all of the audio in the first, third, and fifth tracks between the 1- and 5-second marks was highlighted.
Then I selected the Time Shift Tool (F5). I clicked in the highlighted area in the third track (viz, the 3-second mark) and when I time-shifted this track, tracks one and five followed.
It is a little bit confusing. When I clicked in the third track outside of the highlighted area, only the third track moved. So it is not quite so intuitive as you might hope. Also, in my tests, I did not have any clips within the tracks - I moved the entire tracks.
