Sorry if I’m not finding the right tutorial for this. I’m editing and aligning a forty minute, seven movement choral/chamber orchestra virtual choir piece. The first six movements were fine - the 7th is 12 minutes long and I let people submit tracks in three sections. Aligning the voices and instruments is defeating me and I’m days behind.
I can usually manage alignment by subtracting time and then adding a bit of silence after to compensate. But for this long a piece I need to split up sections and slide along the time line to align. Many of the t6racks will not move. I try to delete boxes of time and sometimes it work, sometimes I have to go to the end of the twelve minutes and move all the split up bits to the right to let me slide something a quart of a second forward in measure 12.I have used audacity for many years, but this has me defeated. If someone understand my issue and can send me to a proper tutorial for something with the many tracks and alignment and balance issues, I would appreciate it.
I probably have no idea about this as I’ve never done it, but I’m assuming that each person in the choral/chamber orchestra had the same piece of music or something that they could listen to while they recorded themselves so that they all had the same timing. I would use that piece of music to begin aligning the various tracks.
So I would probably work with the the seventh movement in a separate audacity project and have two audio tracks for each person or musician in the choral. On the first audio track I would put the first and third part of their audio (you said they submitted in three parts). Then on the second track, I would have the middle piece of their audio. That would give me plenty of room to move each audio section around to line it up for a given musician. Once I have the first and second track of the first musicians audio lined up with the full track audio that was used for timing, I would mix and render those two tracks into a single track. I guess I would need to be careful not to overlap between the two tracks. Then I would use the same process for all the other musicians. At the end I should have each full 7th movement track lined up with each other.
I’m probably oversimplifying this as I’m not sure of all the issues that there might be. How much am I missing on this?
I am not sure why you are having to split up and delete. I am thinking that if you have one master (guide) track, most of what you need to do is just get the start and end for each performer to line up to the master. To do this, it should be a simple matter of using the change speed effect on each performer’s track. Use labels and Boundary Snap Guides to measure the length of the master track, then use change speed and adjust the length for each performer. No need for a calculator. Then again, I have never tried to line up more than about 4 tracks.
Make sure Tracks > Sync-Lock Tracks is turned off.
So I just googled “audacity how to edit a virtual performance” and a number of links popped up.
Then again, I have never tried to line up more than about 4 tracks.