I am trying to cut together a podcast in a great hurry and havent used Audacity before. I seem to have the basics but I wanted to know a quicker way of doing things. basically, I have recorded a number of skype calls and am packaging them together for a podcast. I thought it would be as simple as stitching them together however, Audacity has broken up each phone conversation into lots of small files. When I import them they obviously just list down and start at the same time. Is there a short cut to making them start at the end of the previous file without manually moving them each time? Each conversation was 30 mins so there are so many files to drag.
What you probably did was record the calls and save them. That produces an Audacity Project, not a sound file. To get a stand-alone, standard sound file, you have to Export one. If you do that, then you can set Audacity up to import a pile of WAV sound files very quickly and Export a new show, probably an MP3 for posting on-line.
I don’t know of a good way to open a series of Projects on one timeline, one after the other. So you need to open up each show and File > Export to a WAV file and then open all the WAV files up and export the final show.
Also, there’s no Import > Append, so you’ll need to import each track onto its own timeline and copy and paste to one. You could probably do that with the Projects. Open them all up in their own Audacity and Copy > Paste between production windows.
i actually have abigger problem now. the issue before was that i wasnt using the recent files option. The problem i have now is that i have edited each of those phone calls (over many hours) and edited them together, also added in some audio and saved it as podcast 1. i have since shut down etc and now Audacity shows it as an aup.BAK file and wont let me drag the folder in. There are 1510 files within the folder and i’m fearing the worst. the only other thing is i am saving to my Dropbox and the dropbox tells me it will be syncing the files for the next 30 mins…would this form part of the problem
Are you sure you are using a 2.0.x version of Audacity? See Help > About Audacity and give us all three numbers in the version number. Recent Audacity versions don’t save AUP.BAK files unless there is some obscure bug.
You would be better to use File > Recent Files and open the AUP file, as you mentioned you did last time. If you have moved the _data folder of the same name, you have to put it back in the same folder as the AUP file.
If you have an AUP.BAK file saved by an old version of Audacity, look for the AUP file of the same name (for example, podcast 1.AUP instead of podcast 1.AUP.BAK). You can also rename an AUP.BAK to .AUP and Audacity might open it with more or less problem, assuming the _data folder still has the same name as the project.