kdoc wrote:At times when I slide a snippet it pulls others in the same track along, and at other times it doesn't.
This may be the thing that I mentioned earlier - if you select a clip that butts up to another clip, then selecting the entire clip makes the selection unpredictable as Audacity has to make a judgement call as to whether the selection includes the previous sample (the last sample of the previous clip) or not. I started to type an explanation of why this is, but it's rather complicated and not really relevant - the important thing is to select part of the clip(s) that you want to move and avoid selecting the clip boundary if the clip butts up to another clip.
For big projects I always recommend practising on a small bit and finding the best working method before starting the big project for real (yes, I've found myself half way into a mammoth project then realised that I could have made the thing a whole lot easier if I'd approached it differently from the start).
I'm not sure if this is quite the same as what you are doing, but it may be similar...
A while ago I had a 3 way interview to put together. As the participants were in different countries, the interviewer e-mailed the questions to the interviewee and he recorded his answers. The interviewer recorded the questions, and then recorded a second track with comments in response to some of the answers given by the interviewee. I was then given a script and 3 CDs - one had the interviewers questions, the second had the interviewees response, and the third had the interviewers comments. It was my job to put it all together to make it sound like a live interview.
Fortunately the whole thing was only about 10 minutes long, but it was still a lot of work (especially as there was background noise on the interviewees recording - but that's another story).
What I did was to import all three tracks. Track 1 = Interviewer, Track 2 = Interviewee, Track 3 = comments.
I did not use track linking.
1) Slide tracks 2 and 3 out of the way.
2) Find the end of the first question and split.
3) Drag Track 1 out of the way and slide track 2 into approximately the right place (leaving a little excess space)
4) Repeat 1 to 3 as necessary until I came to a "comment" (on track 3)
5) (Comment) drag tracks 1 and 2 out of the way and roughly position track 3 (again leaving a little excess space)
6) Continue with steps 1 to 5 'till I got to the end.
At this stage I had loads of little clips in approximately the correct places, but it still needed tightening up.
7) Go through and trim off excess silence from each clip, then apply fade-in / fade-out to each clip (to produce seamless joins in finished project)
8) Select Track 2 (Interviewee) and join all of the clips together (Ctrl+J)
9) Select tracks 1 and 3 (interviewer) and "Mix and Render" (to make one continuous interviewer track).
I now have 2 tracks - one for each person, with all the bits in roughly the right places. (this was actually complicated by the interviewer deciding that he wanted some of the questions in a different order, but never mind that). For this I put the interviewer as track 1 and the interviewee as track 2.
Now its just a matter of trimming out some of the silences and accurately aligning each part. Again working from start to end one phrase at a time:
1) Interviewer starts (track 1) - find end of first bit and select up to start of second bit
2) Alt+Ctrl+K (Split Delete)
3) drag track 2 (interviewee) so that response flows from interviewers question.
4) Find end of Interviewees response and Split Delete up to the next thing he says.
5) Drag Interviewers 2nd question (Track 1) into position.
6) Continue in similar fashion to the end.
There were actually some other steps involved so as to make the whole thing gel correctly, but that was the basic procedure. (Also backup and a cup of tea every half hour).
Hope that helps.