Volume Envelopes Shifted when Moving or Splitting Tracks

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

Hello.

I am editing a podcast of mine. This is my first time using Audacity to do so.

I edited the envelopes of my two tracks for an entire hour and a half show. Afterwards, I moved the tracks around and split them a few times in order to add the intro/outro and sound effects that I usually add. When I went back to listen to the show again, the envelopes on my two main tracks were completely messed up. They had clearly moved or something and now I have to go back through the entire show and fix them.

Despite spending half an hour googling for answers, I cannot figure out:

  1. if there is a way to simply move the envelopes on both tracks so they once again are in the correct places, or
  2. if there is a way to delete the all the envelopes on a whole track so I can at least start fresh instead of having to sort out where everything is before editing it again.

I have never had an editing program fail to move the automation when the track moved. This seems like a horribly built feature. Can someone please help me so I don’t have to completely re edit everything?

2

Are you using Audacity 2.1.2 from http://www.audacityteam.org/download/Windows?

You can drag an envelope point laterally, but we don’t have a modifier key that prevents accidental change of amplitude.

There is no automatic way to remove envelope points so as to flatten the envelope, but dragging all the points out of the Envelope Track will do so.

How are you moving the tracks? Time Shift Tool should be OK but there are some bugs with cut, paste and split delete, and some effects that change the Timeline position of the audio do not move the envelope points: http://bugzilla.audacityteam.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=envelope.

It might be an idea to do all the envelope points you can first, then Tracks > Mix and Render which will “cement” the volume changes into the project and clear all the envelope points.


Gale

3

If you are using Audacity 2.1.2 (look in “Help > About Audacity”):

Select the track, then open the “Nyquist Prompt” effect.
In the Nyquist Prompt, paste this code and apply:

;version 4
;codetype lisp
*track*

Note that this only works because Nyquist (a built-in scripting language) does not yet support Audacity’s envelopes, so this is subject to change in the future.