Audacity Forum

For a language course I have to listen to audio tracks and repeat what they are saying. This must be recorded in between the original track.

Obviously, the pauses in their speech are not long enough for me to repeat the text. What I am doing now is quite harsh though, I need insert Silence at each point I need to record something. This is inconvenient because I have to manually find the appropriate breaks for me to record and I have to estimate how much time I need to speak.

So what would be really cool if I could just press 'Play', listen until I need to repeat something, press 'Record' at that moment which starts to record my voice until I press 'Play' or something again, at which point a silence for as long as the new recording is is inserted into the original track and playback continues.

Is something like this currently possible in Audacity?

Yes. Play and pause the Audacity prompt playback on the first computer and then record the playback and your responses on Audacity on the second computer. You only have to touch the second computer at the beginning and the end. Anything can be the second computer. If you have a Zoom audio recorder or even a simple Radio Shack voice recorder, although their quality is sometimes not the best.

Koz

Right, but I'd rather not use additional hardware. On the university we use Sanako software but of course this is not available for Linux so I would like to use something like Audacity.

An alternative to Kozikowskis' suggestion would be to record the foreign language track and insert a periods of silence that is greater than you will need at the appropriate places (you will probably be able to see the places from the visual appearance of the track).
The easiest way to do this is to generate a few seconds of silence and copy it. You van then paste the silence wherever you like using Ctrl +V

When you have done that, click the left mouse button just before the start of one of the foreign language phrases to set the play position, and press the "R" key to start recording. Listen to the phrase and repeat it, then press the space bar to stop.

If you want to try again, press Ctrl +Z to undo.
If you want to move onto the next phrase, click just before the start of the phrase and press the "R" key.