Please help - need to urgently find a way to do this

[NeBlackCat]

I've been running Audacity 24/7 for several weeks to capture the barking of a problem dog in an otherwise quiet cul-de-sac, saving it as a new project every couple of days or so.

I now need to go through those projects and find all the occasions where the dog barks.

Obviously this would be extremely time consuming if done manually/visually, so I was hoping to find a plugin, or some other software tool, that can list the time indexes where the sound rises above some threshold relative to the recent average (ie. the background noise level). I could then manually listen to each occasion to see if it's barking or something else (eg. a car starting, kids shouting, etc).

Does anyone know of such a plugin or software tool? Again, I'm not looking for something to actually detect dog barks (I doubt that exists) just to tell me where there is a noise above the background noise level to manually look at.

[bgravato]

I'm not sure if this feature already existed in Audacity 1.2.x, but in version 1.3.x you have the "Sound finder..." feature in the Analyze menu.

[steve]

You need "Sound Finder" which is in the Analyze menu in Audacity 1.3.13 http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Anal ... _detection

You can get Audacity 1.3.13 from here: http://audacityteam.org/download/

Note that Audacity 1.3.13 can open projects created by Audacity 1.2.x, but Audacity 1.2 cannot open projects that have been saved by Audacity 1.3.

As your recordings are very large, processing will be very slow. I highly recommend that you have a practice on a short test file before you start working on the actual recordings. I also highly recommend that you immediately make back-up copies of the recordings. Note that the maximum file size for a WAV file is 4 GB.

The way I would approach the task would be to export a series of 1 hour WAV files from each project and name the files appropriately, then make back-up copies of each WAV file (preferably on a second hard drive). I would then test the sound finder settings on a short section of the hour long file before applying it to the full one hour.

See here for how to split a long recording into smaller sections. http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Split ... ate_tracks
For initially splitting the recording into one hour sections, place labels manually each hour, the "Export Multiple".

[kozikowski]

Audacity Projects are brittle and easily damaged. Projects aren't "files." They're collections of files and folders and can get out of step with each other and fail -- particularly if you're trying to use Audacity as a surveillance device.

So file exports in WAV or other high quality format are a really good idea.
Don't move, rename, "clean up" or do any other file management until you back up your Projects as Exported Sound Files. Then make copies and put the copies on a backup drive or storage device.

Koz