I am looking for a simple and user friendly Speech Editor. I am not (yet) a user of Audacity but I hope that some experienced user might be able to tell me whether Audacity can perform what I need.
The objective is to create an error free digital file of speech.
The file needs to be a simple one track file. Clearly, copy, paste and delete are functions needed.
Question: Will delete remove a marked section AND remove the deleted segment w/o leaving a silent passage?
Is there an “insert” function which I define as follows:
The curser is to be moved to a selected position within the single track. After activating the insert function words spoken into a microphone must be inserted into the existing single track w/o overwriting existing matrial.
Recording inserts into some other track and then copying and pasting it into the main track is not acceptable.
Can Audacity be set to perform these functions? If not could some expert refer me to another audio editor that would meet my needs? Any help will be greatly appreciated!
That one bothers me a little. What do you mean by that?
Given that “insert” will require recording live speech to a separate track and then pasting, yes. I think Audacity should do what you want.
Audacity restrictions usually vanish in comparison to the task of actually recording live voice. Do you have that part down already? Good microphone, good soundproof room? Blast shield? Stable MicPre?
One more. I would personally be recording and producing stereo rather than mono and just carry the same show on both tracks (really two-track mono rather that “stereo”). That will keep you out of trouble with software that naturally assumes that you’re weird if you don’t have stereo. I have a music CD burning program that will fail with a mono sound file.
Koz
“The objective is to create an error free digital file of speech” means a speech file in which all words are the most non ambiguous ones, all expressions are correct, all pauses are the correct length. This is needed for a set of instructions to be followed. Text voice recognition can not meet such demands.
From your description it is clear that to insert just one word in Audacity requires several manual operations which in an “insert” function would be automated. Because this is not the case in Audacity, I will have to look elsewhere for a suitable program.
I would be interested to hear if you find a recording program with this feature - I can think of several situations where it could be useful, so please drop by and tell us if there is such a thing.
Also, if there is no suitable program, please feel free to call back again with your question - there will probably be a way to achieve the results that you require with Audacity, even if it is not by the method that you would prefer to use.