I am new content creator on YouTube, but have been using Audacity for a few years on some of my other audio projects.
I am looking for a way to save my workflow process. If one doesn’t exist, perhaps this could be a future enhancement for Audacity?
Currently - I generally record voiceovers and video with a ZOOM HN4 Pro, nearly always using a Rode Wireless Go with a lavalier mic (just so everything is recorded the same way)
My workflow is almost always the same.
Copy Original Files to Audacity
SOLO file I’m working on
Normailze Audio
Noise Reduction (Select silent portion to isolate background noise only)
Re-Apply Noise Reduction to entire clip
Compress
Export selected file as WAV
Close File, and repeat the above process with ALL additional recordings
Is there a way to automated this process, since I repeatedly do the same thing over and over? I would only do this with recordings created in the same environment (studio) with the same equipment, at the same sound levels and settings.
I was just about to post - Disregard, I found the macros. So thank you for that.
But I do have another question. At the end of the process I was trying to Export as WAV, then close and Export the next file. I was able to do this in Macros, by creating a second macro (unmute focus track, export as wav, close focus track)
I’d like to add a repeat to this function, but couldn’t come up with a way to do that - Repeat Last Effect - reapplies the Large Macro I’m running, not the actual last step in the macro.
My workaround was to create a macro that runs like this
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3…
Save and Close (Macro I created)
Save and Close
Save and Close
I basically added the last macro 10 times, to allow me to save and close up to 10 open tracks. Do you know of a way to repeat last step?
You can assign a keyboard shortcut to your macro and then if you have 5 files open at the end, you would press something like “Alt-C” 5 times.
You assign a keyboard shortcut to a nacro using Edit > Preferences > Keyboard. Then locate your nacro name in the list, click on it, then add a keyboard shortcut down in the box next to Set and Clear.
Here is the workflow I came up with. Using a separate macro to export and close the files. This creates some blank files if editing less than ten at a time, but still much faster than doing it the old way - I may add that keyboard shortcut suggested by Mike.
A slight modification of workflow could be to use a Macro for “batch processing”.
To do this, you would need to grab a noise profile before running the batch, but after that you could select any number of files to process, and each selected file would in turn be imported, processed, and exported.
Thats how I do it in the video as well - Grab my Noise Reduction Sample first - then run the Macro.
The only issue I ran into was exporting and closing each file in the batch. I created another macro to do this, but had to basically set a number of times to run that macro which results additional blank files
PS - Thanks everyone for the input, new to the forum
Macros may be applied to either the current project (as shown in your video), or applied to a selection of files (as I’m suggesting).
The benefit of applying to a selection of files is that you have one list of commands which is then applied to any number of files - no need to list each command multiple times, and no empty files at the end.
That was what led me to create the macro. If I select all the files, then run the macro it will only Export and Close the first file. I was hoping to use the Repeat command to continue to close any remaining files, but couldn’t make that work. How do you suggest I process the files as a batch? I must b missing something?
