Tips for conveniently recording many small tracks?

[jophsng]

I would like to record many small tracks. For example, I would spend one hour beside the microphone and every couple minutes or so I would click and hold while talking (like a walkie talkie) and say a few words for future reference. Does audacity have a feature to allow you to do the click and hold method and make a new track with each recording? And could it record the real time (clock time, e.g. 5:04 pm and 32 seconds) that each track started? And then could it export a table that had the track number and time that track recording began?

It would also be OK, but not as ideal, to have continuous recording throughout the whole period and then have Audacity put down a mark each time the mouse was clicked or a button was pushed. This would only really be useful if there was a convenient way to jump from mark to mark and to record the time--track time or clock time--when the mark was made (preferably again in an exportable table).

[steve]

I'll answer with reference to Audacity 1.3.13 (the 1.2.x series is no longer being developed and lacks many features of the 1.3.x series. Audacity 1.3.13 will work well on XP, Vista and Win 7).

Does audacity have a feature to allow you to do the click and hold method and make a new track with each recording?

By default, each time you start a recording a new track is created, so all you need to do is to click the Record button (or "R" on the keyboard) to start recording a new track and click the Stop button (or spacebar) to stop.

could it record the real time (clock time, e.g. 5:04 pm and 32 seconds) that each track started?

No, though you could record yourself saying the time at the start of each recording.

And then could it export a table that had the track number and time that track recording began?

No.

It would also be OK, but not as ideal, to have continuous recording throughout the whole period and then have Audacity put down a mark each time the mouse was clicked or a button was pushed.

Yes you can do that. Press Ctrl+M to create a label (marker) during the recording and (optionally) type in text for the marker. If you just want the position marked without adding any label text, just press the ENTER key after creating the label.

A list of all labels can be accessed (and exported as a text file) from the Tracks menu (Tracks > Edit Labels). As long as you know the time that the track started (or ended) you could work out the real time of each track by adding (or subtracting) the track time from the start/end time of the recording.

[jophsng]

Thank you Steve, this saves me a lot of time. Joe