Audacity Forum

i have many labels on a single track
i need to cut out some of the segments.
when i cut them out the segments, the labels just stay where they were and are now in the wrong place.
please, please tell me i am missing something simple here....
thank you in advance for any help.

Labels aren't as handy as you think. They're not edit points. They're just little pieces of sticky tape you put on the screen to tell you where you are, help align multiple audio tracks, and export a single timeline into multiple songs.

http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... ate_tracks

Like it says in the wiki entry, if you delete all the letters in the track label and them press enter, the marker will vanish.

Markers are connected to the time progression, not the song. So yes, if you delete a song, all the markers from then on will be in exactly the right time, but point to the wrong song.

Managing edit points is a long future feature request for the next Audacity version. Even the higher end audio editors have trouble with this--at least compared to video editors.

Koz

No, rest assured dni - you're not missing somethin simple .......

To do this you need to select the same section from both the label track and the music track(s) at the same time - and this is not an obvious manoeuvre to execute in Audacity.

What you need to do is to start off with your cursor position in the label track, click there and then drag sideways and (normally upwards) into the music track(s). You will then see that you have selections on both the label and the music tracks which cover the same time period. It doesn't seem to work so well if you start off in the music track - don't know why.

What you need to do then is to use the Edit/Delete. Note carefully thatou can't just use the "Delete" key on your keyboard to effect this deletion - an action you can do on pure music tracks. Similarly if you want to delete a section from a lable track, then you will also need to use the Edit/Delete and not the "Delete" key.

This should leave your music and labels nicely lined up in synch as you require.

But Koz' advice about the utility, or otherwise, of labels is extremely sound. Track labelling should normally be the last thing that you do - after all your editing - and just before using the Multiple Export. They're next to useless as edit markers.

WC