Hello, I am using Audacity 2.0.6 on Windows 7. I have a main instrumental track and have recorded multiple tracks for verses, overdubs, choruses, etc. I have tried exporting these as individual tracks but once I have sent these tracks via email, they all begin playing at once.
I found a forum topic that said for any track not starting to play immediately to click right after ‘0’, press SHIFT > HOME and “Generate Silence”. I was hoping to get clarification on this.
Verse vocal tracks start at one point, chorus tracks start at another, etc. Will following the above instructions fix everything, regardless of when each track actually begins playing or did I misunderstand and Silence has to be generated up until each track begins?
If you perform musical alignment with the Time Shift Tool and pushing tracks around, the gap between time zero and the first note on any track will not export. One way out is to jam Generate > Silence in the hole. But you have to do it to every track you moved.
I think you can get around this by generating one extra silent track between time zero and some time after the show ends. Export the whole pile into one show and the gaps and timing should be OK… I think. But that won’t affect the individual exports.
You’re padding with silence to maintain the alignment ?.
You can do that using “Mix and render” with a silent track before exporting as WAV … NB: padding with silence will significantly increase the size of the individual files you’re sending in WAV format : in WAV format silence takes up as much memory per second as music, [ consider FLAC format instead ].
If you email as an audacity project, the alignment of the various tracks will be maintained without padding with silence, [ but the recipient will have to use Audacity too ].
Thank you both for your responses. My problem is this:
1.) I am incredibly new to any type of recording software, so I apologize if any of these questions are at the beginner level.
2.) My engineer is not using Audacity and is not familiar with it. He wanted me to send the individual tracks with everything starting at 0(or so I thought) for him to mix the song properly.
I need to figure out the easiest way to send him the individual tracks so that everything will line up when he imports them into whatever software he is using. If you have any advice on this, please let me know.
Press Ctrl+A (select All)
Press the Home button (moves the cursor to the start of the project).
“Generate menu > Silence” and generate 1 second of silence.
Then export the tracks.
Because the tracks now all have “audio” (albeit “silence”) at the start, they will be exported from time = 0.0.
