Split and align tracks based on silence in tracks

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

Hi im using audacity 2.1.2 exe on win10. What i have is a list of words in english, russian, and german spoken using text to spech. I have placed a comma between each word as some translation are multi word for one. So each audio file is made up of a list of words in the respective language spaced by silence.
Is there away to allign each translated word. So for “The dog ran” the would be spoken at the same time in on all three tracks and so languages, and dog, and ran etc.
CHeers
Damian

2

Have I got this right?
You have, for example, got a recording of:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog

and in another track, a recording of:

Der schnelle braune Fuchs sprang über den faulen Hund

and you want to adjust the space between words so that when played together, you don’t get:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog
Der schnelle braune Fuchs sprang über den faulen Hund

you want to get:

The   quick    brown    fox   jumped   over  the   lazy     dog
Der   schnelle braune   Fuchs sprang   über  den   faulen   Hund

Is that going to work? Some languages use words in a different order.

3

Yeah steve thats exactly what i was after. Yeah they do use in different order and in some case use many words for one word specially used in sentences however when you split the words up in the sentences with commas they generally come out pretty simplified

4

I can’t think of a good automated way of doing this, other than spending a lot of time developing a plug-in, but even then it’s not going to be perfect because there are too many “unknowns” to be able to reliably calculate spacing.

To do it semi-manually:

  1. Use the “StretchPause” experimental plug-in from this post (https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/modified-silence-marker-to-insert-more-silence/29449/12) to expand the gaps between words of the first language track
  2. Use “Silence Finder” (http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/silence_finder_and_sound_finder.html#silence) to label the gaps of the second language track,
  3. Then use “Edit Menu > Labeled Audio > Split” (http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/edit_menu_labeled_audio.html#split) to split the track up
  4. Then repeat for each other language track,
  5. Then use the “Multi-tool” (http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/multi_tool.html) combined with Shift or Ctrl to move the audio clips.
  6. Repeat step 5 for each language track

Step 5 is quite tricky until you get the hang of it:

  1. Click on an empty part of the info panel on the left end of the second track to select the second track
  2. F6 to switch to the Multi-Tool
  3. Move the cursor over the second audio clip (assuming no need to move the first audio clip)
  4. Hold down the Shift key. The cursor becomes a left pointing arrow.
  5. Left click. The left end of the selection jumps to the cursor position.
  6. Release the shift key and the mouse button
  7. Move the mouse pointer over the shaded (selected) area that contains all clips from the 2nd onward.
  8. Hold down the Ctrl button. The cursor becomes a double headed horizontal arrow (for “time shift”)
  9. Left click and drag to the right to line up the word in the second audio clip with the second word in the first track
  10. Repeat steps iii to ix for the rest of the track
5

Thank you very much for such a concise answer. that is exactly what i was after. It would have been nice to find a way to automate this but ah well. Thank you
Damian

6

Came across this tool when looking at making epub3 audio books. Maybe of value in this situation, not sure.
https://www.readbeyond.it/aeneas/
Cheers