I am a Technology Support Technician at a language/culture studies college. A professor had his students record responses to an .mp3 file that asked the user a series of questions in Spanish. It was made to simulate a job interview. The speaker in the audio file would ask a question, there would be maybe 90 seconds of silence, then the next question would start. The student responses were recorded during the 90 seconds of silence. The audio file is about 15 minutes in length. His students recorded their responses using the program Sanako 1200 7.10(and Sanako headsets) and I sent the new audio files (with the recording + student responses) to him. Professor wants to use Audacity to listen to the student recordings, provide audio feedback at certain times (i.e. “you pronounced this incorrectly”), grade it, and send it back to the student.
He has used Audacity before, whereas I don’t have a lot of experience with it. He is looking for a feature he is absolutely certain was included before but he is unsure how to utilize this feature again.
Professor states there was a button that would stop the audio, allow him to record his feedback (without overwriting the currently playing audio), and then start back playing the audio. I am unable to find this feature in Audacity. I have learned how to use Audacity and wrote up a simple support guide for the faculty, but the Professor is not satisfied.
The alternatives to his request that I have found are (sent to him for his consideration):
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While you are listening to the audio play and want to record over a certain section: Click “Stop”; click the area you would like to start recording (such as during the silent pause between a student’s responses); and click “Record” to start recording in this section. I thought he would record over the many silent pauses in the recording. This was unsatisfactory.
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During the recording, when you have found a place to provide feedback, click that area. Hit “Stop”. In the menu at the top, click Generate > Silence. A box will pop up asking how many seconds of silence you would like to add at this point. By default it is 30 seconds, which is a good amount to leave feedback. You can trim the silence later if it is too much and if you need more, you can append another period of silence to the first one. Go ahead and record during this silence. It is seamlessly integrated into the full recording when you export the file (say, as an mp3). This was unsatisfactory as well.
He is absolutely certain there was just a button that would pause the recording and allow him to record as long as he needs during the pause. When he is done, the audio plays through the rest of the track until he needs to provide feedback again, at which point he clicks this button again.
Does this make sense to anyone? Does Audacity have this capability? I have read the guides and FAQs, but I cannot find anything on this matter. Thank you for your assistance.
Audacity 2.0.2 (installed on image, .exe)
Windows 7 64-bit