So What I want to do is record my own voice using a blue tooth dongle as a form of journaling myself. Its not that I am unable to do this myself using audacity it’s more I am seeking a more veteran opinion on what I am trying to do. At the moment it works fine but the biggest feature I would like is the ability to automatically stop recording at a noise threshold and then continue again or even having a way to edit out all empty space in my recoding in a relatively procedural way. This would enable me to have breaks in talking but continuing recording without having to chop it up later. A big issue is whenever I stop and then start it again it wants to record it to a new track which means I have to edit them into a single track later.
I am fairly new to Audacity so am I using it for the wrong purpose or is it a viable solution? if it is not I would welcome any suggestions on alternative programs that would give me the ability to do this.
I’m sorry if this is detailed anywhere else but I have looked and was unable to find anything anyware, any suggested readings would be great.
So yeah any tips on making my system better would be highly appreciated.
Many thanks for the help stevethefiddle, you answered all my questions in one go
I’m not sure if I should start another thread about this but what if I want to set up some sort of surveillance system? Would audacity be suited for the initial recording or should I use another program to record and then bring it into audacity to edit it and remove the silence? If audacity does not fill this role do you have a recommendations.
I’ve not tried it myself, but there have been some reports of problems with very long recordings in Audacity (greater than 12 hours). There was one user that was using Audacity for extremely long recordings (months of continuous audio), though I think that they eventually turned to an alternative method.
My recommendation would be to look to a hardware solution, such as a voice recorder that has a “pause on silence” feature. This would cut down dramatically on file size and make editing far easier.
If all the tracks are mono, Audacity mixes the files down to one mono track. If one or more of the tracks are stereo (or panned off centre) Audacity will mix the tracks down to a stereo track on Export.
I have been reading up on scripting with audacity and it seems like it is only now getting scripting implemented.
Is audacity currently at the point were it would be feasible to script a system to record for and an hour. stop the record, save it and then repeat. That way each day you could end up a folder full of 24 1 hour music files.
