Audacity Forum

I would like to copy my old vinyls to electronic format. Have wired up turntable to pc and it works well. But is there a simple way I can insert the breaks between each track on the album or do I need to record every track individually?

Sorry if its an obvious question but by the very fact I have vinyls, you will relise that I was born in an earlier era!

Many thanks

All you need to do is to place a label at each track break - use the Ctrl-B shortcut - and don't forget to place a label right at the beginning for the first track.

Then use Audacity's Export Multiple command (available from the File drop-down) to export a multiple set of WAVs, MP3s or whatever.

The Audacity Wiki, Documentation and Turorials have much useful information on how to do this - a recommended read - http://audacityteam.org/help/

WC

Many thanks - I will try this straight away. But can I do this while its recording or only afterwards on playback? (as I only seem to be able to hear through pc speakers on playback and not when recording)

You can only do this after you have finished recording - similarly the effects can only be applied after recording, not during.

Such dynamic functionality would take much more compute power - and a lot more programming effort from those kind people who donate their time for free to bring us this great free software.

WC

Many thanks - appreciate your help

CORRECTION

You can add labels while Audacity is recording - I just tested it on 1.2 and 1.3

You may not want to though as recording is a very compute and disc intensive process anyway - also if you edit bits out later then the labels will not move in line with the edited tracks. You may, for example, want to fade-out and fade-in between tacks to remove the "silent"hissy vinyl bits between tracks - and you may want to reduce the inter-track time.

IMHO it is much better to do the track breaks and labelling after all editing/cleaning and just before the export.

WC

Also, you can't move a label once it's placed, so if you're a tiny bit off you'll have to go back and fix it later anyway.

I agree with Waxcylinder, labeling is best left for the last step before exporting when doing this sort of thing. I doubt that it is going to cause any errors in the recording though, since it's such a small amount of data needed to add a label.

Of course, if you're recording a conversation and you want to mark important points so you can go back to them later, then it's nice that you can add labels while recording.