how can i control where a copied clip gets pasted?

[shmulik]

This is my first day using Audacity. I'm getting the hang of it, but one wall I keep hitting is pasting a clip I've copied. I've selected a clip of recorded material, copied it, placed the cursor somewhere else on the time axis and hit "paste" - and inevitably it gets stuck right at the end of whatever was last recorded on the track.

I feel like there should be a simple, intuitive way to control where the clip goes but I can't figure it out. What am I missing here?

[Des]

Hi shmulik
Try this with me
Import a wave file, 2or3 minutes long
Select/highlight the first half (roughly)
In EDIT click silence, not cut or delete.
You should now have on your screen a wave file with no sound for the first minute or so and sound at the back end.
Now select a few seconds of sound from the back end of the song and click copy.
Move your cursor to a spot in the silent half and click. (you should see a little hand pointing)
Now click paste
How did you do
Des

[steve]

Also, have a look at this topic: http://audacityteam.org/forum/viewtopic ... 519#p25850

[shmulik]

thanks Des and Steve,
both suggestions help somewhat.
However, the problem I ran into had a lot to do with attempting to copy and paste *multiple tracks*. For example, say I have 2 tracks of audio and I want a section of both of them to repeat - let's say I want from 0:00 to 0:05 to be copied and pasted so it plays again from 0:05 to 0:10. I select the desired section of the 2 tracks - now what? I am having trouble pasting 2 tracks' worth of sound, even if I have selected two tracks' worth.

It seems as I look at my first project that I saved (when i posted my earlier question) like I found some way to do that, maybe, but I was also having the trouble of trying to select portions of audio across several tracks that didn't all contain sound through the whole selection. Take my same example from above, selecting from 0 to :05 on 2 tracks, but imagine track 2 only has audio up to 0:03.
Now if I copied and found a way (however I may have done that?!) to paste onto both tracks at once, track 1's copied section will begin at :05 and track 2's will begin at 0:03.

[steve]

For example, say I have 2 tracks of audio and I want a section of both of them to repeat - let's say I want from 0:00 to 0:05 to be copied and pasted so it plays again from 0:05 to 0:10. I select the desired section of the 2 tracks - now what?

Select "Repeat" from the "Effects" menu. In this case, the number of repeats that you require is 1.

I think that for the kind of stuff you are wanting to do you would manage better with Audacity 1.3.x as it has much more flexibility when it comes to handling multiple audio clips on tracks. ("Split cut", "Split delete", "Split New" are some of the new features that you will find useful.)

[shmulik]

Is Audacity 1.3.x the version that is for Mac, but not yet fully supported?

[steve]

1.3.5 is the beta version - there's a few bugs in it, but not many, and they can mostly be worked around. Personally I find the benefits of 1.3.5 to greatly outweigh the bug issues. Note also, that not all of the known bugs affect all machines, but if you intend to do any serious production work with Audacity 1.3.x, you should do a lot of testing first so as to get to know it and know if there are any issues that you need to work around.

Audacity 1.4 (due out next year) will be the new stable version - based on 1.3.x, and hopefully with all the bugs fixed.