When recording albums, Audacity leaves other songs in recording. I'm recording albums and saving the tracks individually for later playing. Thanks

[Curlyblues]

Forgive me if this has been covered before (I couldn’t find the topic). I’m new to Audacity. I’m recording albums (whole sides at a time). When I delete a song and move to the next one, it leaves a copy of that track at the end of the song. Do I just have to record one song, close the file and start over to prevent the ghost track? There’s got to be a better solution. Windows 10 machine… Any help/suggestions are appreciated. Thanks.

[DVDdoug]

I’m not following exactly what you’re doing…

But what I do is record one side and export the whole side as a WAV file as a “backup”. Then I select/highlight one song at a time and then Export Selection to export each song one at time as a separate file.

Then close that file and start the other side. (1)

Or, there is a “recommended way” of Labeling the songs and then using Export Multiple

(I almost never save an Audacity AUP3 Project file.)

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(1) Actually, I do a couple of other steps which I will share without giving you a lot of detail:

I combine both sides to make one long album track.

I’m assuming these are vinyl albums…

I’ll try to remove any vinyl clicks & pops. Audacity has Click Removal and Repair. I’ve used Wave Repair ($30 USD) for a long time (although I don’t digitize records that much these days. It does and audibly perfect job on most clicks & pops but can be VERY time consuming because you have to identify the defects manually. The good thing is that it only “touches” the audio where you identify a defect.

Wave Corrector (FREE) is another click & pop remover. It’s fully automatic. I don’t have a lot of experience with it.

A lot of older records are a bit dull sounding (rolled-off highs) so I’ll sometimes use the Graphic EQ to boost the highs.

The last “processing” I do is run the Amplify or Normalize effect to “maximize” the volume (for 0dB peaks). Normalizing the whole album at once changes all of the songs by the same amount so it maintains the relative loudness of the songs, as originally intended. But if you like, you can normalize/maximize all of the songs individually.

Then I select and export one song at a time. Sometimes I’ll trim the song a little long. and when I’m done I’ll re-open them to remove any excess silence at the beginning and end. If you work on the songs one-at-a-time, save your intermediate files as WAV (or FLAC). If you want MP3 or (other lossy format) export as MP3 once as the last step.

Then I use mp3Tag to add the album artwork, and for any tag (metadata) editing. Audacity doesn’t support embedded artwork. (mp3Tag works with all of the popular formats, not just MP3.