Newbie Question(s)

[drhiii]

I've worked with Audacity off and on and am still not getting my head around it. Follows are newb question that may get me hung by a noose, but I have tried to learn these through several tutorials and still cannot master even the simplest tasks.

Here goes...

I load in a file. Good. I listen to the audio. Good. I want to be able to extract, snip, cut, whatever the term, a section of the audio. I can muck my way through it, but I cannot find out how to do the simplest things, like....

If I hear the beginning of where I want to cut, I would like to be able to...

# 1 Mark that point.
# 2 try to find the end of the section and Mark that point, and
# 3 be able to adjust slightly the marked points. Like being able to tweak the beginning mark forward or backward.
# 4 and I would need to be able to review (listen) to the beginning and end marks so I know where I am.

Instead, I have to literally fly blind. I have not figured out how to do do these simple tasks above. Mark a beginning, and end, listen to the beginning, middle, and end withut messing up the desired area (greyed out) that I want to ultimately cut and save, and how to be able to adjust the beginning and end marked point even by one or two seconds, fine tuning it you will. I have not found any tutorial or discuss that shows how to do this. How does one fine tune their selections like this? Any tutorial, or just plain explanation, would be really, really appreciated.

regards

[alatham]

You can't do this in the way that you seem to think you can.

You can make a mark while a project is playing ([ctrl]+m), but you can't move a mark (I don't know why this is, and I disagree with this decision).

However, the easiest way to do this is to highlight a portion that's larger than what you know you need, press [ctrl]+t to trim the selection (cut everything that isn't highlighted out of a track).

At this point, it would be really nice to be able to move marks around and to select the space between two marks, but Audacity doesn't work that way (yet, leave a message at the 'Adding Features to Audacity' board).

So the best we can do is highlight what you think you need and make small adjustments to that until you've got it just right. You can drag the edges of a selected segment with the mouse, so that kind of makes up for not being able to move markings around. You can save a selection in the Edit menu, but you're limited to storing only one.

So this is an area where Audacity needs improvement. I hope that helps.

[kozikowski]

<<<<<
# 1 Mark that point.
# 2 try to find the end of the section and Mark that point, and
# 3 be able to adjust slightly the marked points. Like being able to tweak the beginning mark forward or backward.
# 4 and I would need to be able to review (listen) to the beginning and end marks so I know where I am.
>>>>>>

See? I'm not making that up. I didn't pay him, either.

Everybody wants the same thing. Clip selection is really awkward without a better facility for marking edit points. We gotta set the programmers down in front of a two-hour long lecture and tell them to select and export segments. I figure in about six hours or so they'll be a sobbing mess and ready to completely redesign the cursor and clip selection system.

Koz

[richardash1981]

KOS: Please submit a patch - the developers will be very interested. In the mean time you can always drag the edges of a selection to change them, then add a label at the selection once it's right - which works rather well. Or you could just split out that section to a new track if you prefer.