When using Audacity 2.0.6 on Windows 7 Home Premium 32 version, a problem has developed. Sometimes when exporting multiple MP3 files from an Audacity project the name of a track appears in the folder to which it has been exported, but there is nothing in that folder - there is no sound for that track! This also happened with an older version of Audacity - but only recently. How can I be sure that every track is exported properly?
I would be glad if somebody could come to my rescue!
Many thanks, Reg Burrows
In which application does the track have no sound? If you were recording with a USB device, unplug it, so that you can hear the song in Windows Media Player: Audacity Manual.
If that is not the problem, have you dragged the song that has no sound back into Audacity? Is it the right length? Is it a flat line? If the song is too short, you might have accidentally dragged a small region when you set a label, so that only that small region was exported. Click in the label to check that. If you can see a pair of arrows in the Timeline (above the waves) pointing towards each other, then you have a region label.
Gale
Dear Gale,
Many thanks for your reply.
The problem is not just that I can’t hear any sound - there is no sound there to hear. The track appears on the list of tracks exported, it has no bites in - nothing! When exporting, the file is exported INSTANTLY - indicating that nothing has been exported. Similarly, when the tracks are being played the title of the empty track appears for a moment and then the next track is played.
There is nothing there to drag back into Audacity. It has just disappeared!!
Quite a problem
Look forward to hearing from you if you have any bright ideas.
All good wishes,
Reg
If there is a truly a zero bytes file it still exists and you can still drag it back into Audacity (for what that’s worth).
You can look in Explorer to see the file size (switch to Details view).
I suggest you say exactly where you are playing the exported file, perhaps that is relevant.
If you have an Audacity project for this, please double check as I suggested that you have made point labels and not small region labels. Are you exporting multiple by labels or tracks? Does the Audacity window that pops up after you click “Export” in Export Multiple have the expected list of files successfully exported, or does it say the export was cancelled?
Gale
I have had this problem , go to the track label that has no data, delete and replace with a new one and try again.
Sometimes this can happen if you move or nudge a point label accidentally creating a small range label.
Look carefully at the label icon, it has three components each of which will independently light up white when you g=hover over them to make them active:
- clicking on the little central round one and laterally moving the mouse moves the label left or right along the timeline
- clicking on the left (or right) arrow-head and laterally moving the mouse extends the boundary of that which is labelled to the left or the right thus turning the point label into a range label.
Fundamentally a point label and a range label are the same - a point label is just a range label of zero length. It is quite easy to create a very short range label by mistake by nudging one of the arrow-heads ( don’t ask me how I know 
) and you can only see that it has become a range label by zooming in at very high magnification.
The problem is that Export Multiple treats range labels and point labels differently - see this page in the Manual: Audacity Manual
In particular study the examples at the bottom of that page.
And this is why bill2E’s advice, above, is likely to have worked for him 
WC
There is a draft proposal on labelling improvement in the Audacity Wiki: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Proposal_Label_Enhancements
Collapse region label to a point label
It contains as part of it:
Steve 19Apr13 from a forum thread:perhaps there could be a right-click option (when right-clicking within a label region) for “collapse to point label”? That sounds like a good idea to me, but raises the question, where exactly should the point label be positioned, at the start, middle or end of the region? Perhaps the resulting point label could be determined by where exactly you right-click: If you right-click near the start, then the point label is at the start of the region. Right-click near the end and the point label is at the end. Right-click near the middle and the point label is at the mid position.Perhaps accurate right-clicking is too fiddly?
Peter 31Jul13: I’d vote for “start” - that keeps it nice and simple.
Gale 31Jul13: I too like the right-click solution to collapsing a region label to a point label but think options for creating the point label at the left or right edge of the region label should be provided.
Peter 14Sep15: +1 for Gale’s suggestion
But that of course requires you to realize that you have a range label - not always easy as discussed above
There is also another proposal in the Wiki which could aid that: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Proposal_Label_Track_Info
which aims to display the count of point, region and pre-zero labels in the Label Track Info area.
All of the Audacity folk who work in QA (and work as Forum elves here) have voted positively for this proposal, but sadly to date no developer has picked this up.
WC (Peter)
You don’t have to zoom in to check. Just click in the label at any zoom level.
If it’s a point label it will have one left-pointing arrowhead in the Timeline, but if it’s a region label it will have a right pointing arrowhead in the Timeline as well as left-pointing one:
And in this case, you can also tell it’s not a point label because it has no vertical line in the waveform when the label has been selected. This is because we are too far zoomed out to display the region.
Gale
Cute trick - this is me writing it down …