Track Splitting Workflow

[brianejsmith]

I have a single long track recorded at a Karaoke evening which I want to split into the individual songs. I have imported and been through the track, finding the start and end times for each performer's effort.

Is there anyway I can create a list of labels in WORD or EXCEL, import that list in to Audacity 1.3 (beta on a Windows 7 PC) and then use the Export Multiple function to write out the indivdiual tracks?

If not in WORD or EXCEL is there a way I can create a list of labels directly within Audacity using the start and stop times and then export the resulting tracks?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Brian Smith

[waxcylinder]

Yes you can do this - see: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Label_Tracks

and this tutorial: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Spli ... ate_tracks

which is part of this set of useful tutorials: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Tuto ... iscs_to_CD

WC

[brianejsmith]

Can't thank you enough WC; brilliant answer.

I just set up a multi-row, 3 column table in WORD, fill-in the rows one by one for each song entering the start time, end time and song name and when I'm done, convert the table to text, specifying TAB as the delimiter, save the file and then import it into Audacity having first loaded the track? Then Export multiple and I'm done?

Bloody marvellous!

Two questions remain:

With what precision do the times have to be specified? I only recorded them as hh.mm.ss. In the example they go to hh.mm.ssssss.

Can I enter the track name AND the singer's name; ie can my table have 4 columns?

[brianejsmith]

Following on from my previous post, while I thought I had it cracked it turns out I've still some way to go.

After a lot of messing about with EXCEL I eventually converted my hh:mm:ss timings to seconds but now Audacity says it can't open the text file!

In the hope that it might help I have attached the text file of labels so you can see what I am trying to do.

[steve]

Get rid of the apostrophes. They are not valid characters for labels.
To be safe, use only letters, numbers, space, hyphen and underscore.

[brianejsmith]

Hi WC

Did what you said and the file was opened and applied OK. The strange thing is, once the label track is imported, I can add the apostrophes back using the Edit Label function without any complaint from Audacity. And a note to the developers: an apostrophe in a song title isn't exactly a rare occurrence!

What did really really bug me was Audacity's behaviour when it couldn't find Lame. I'd spent about half an hour updating the metadata for the 30 tracks but when I tried to export them to MP3 format Audacity reported it couldn't find Lame and clicking OK to acknowledge the error message undid (lost) all the changes I had painstakingly made to the metadata fields in the labels. A real pain!

But sincere thanks for your help with the apostrophe business.

And PS; seconds really does mean seconds. Specifying times as hh:mm:ss as the rest of Audacity does, won't work. The start and end times have to be in seconds. (Had to get the EXCEL drains up to sort that one!)

[Gale Andrews]

Did what you said and the file was opened and applied OK. The strange thing is, once the label track is imported, I can add the apostrophes back using the Edit Label function without any complaint from Audacity. An apostrophe in a song title isn't exactly a rare occurrence!

To clarify, as I often have to, you can have any Unicode character in labels in Unicode versions of Audacity on Unicode operating systems, including Windows 2000 or later. You can have Arabic characters, apostrophes, musical symbols or whatever.

This is a valid Windows file on Windows 2000 or later:

♪♪♪ ' ﷼.wav

There is a restriction that some characters are reserved by the operating system and cannot be used in file names. On Windows, these characters (including double quotes) are illegal in file names and Audacity will not accept them.

Code: Select all

 /  : *  ? " < > |

If you want a double quote in a file name, use two apostrophes.

It is a good idea to stick to file names having Roman letters, numbers, hyphen, dash or underscore if you give the file to anyone else. They may be on some other operating system, or sending such a file over the internet may fail.

If you create your labels text file in an text application that supports UTF-8 there should not be a problem with importing it into Audacity, whatever characters it contains. The problem is that Microsoft applications do not always support UTF-8 encoding (properly) or may not export as UTF-8 by default unless you look for a "Save As" option that specifies it.

What did really really bug me was Audacity's behaviour when it couldn't find Lame. I'd spent about half an hour updating the metadata for the 30 tracks but when I tried to export them to MP3 format Audacity reported it couldn't find Lame and clicking OK to acknowledge the error message undid (lost) all the changes I had painstakingly made to the metadata fields in the labels.

Sorry about that. The same would happen if you did not have the FFmpeg library configured correctly.

It doesn't happen with straight export, where the metadata you enter is stored, but when using export multiple you probably actually want different data for the unique fields for each file. So there is little point storing even the fields for the last file.

I suppose the answer would be to ensure that export multiple throws the failure to find the library before entering metadata.

seconds really does mean seconds. Specifying times as hh:mm:ss as the rest of Audacity does, won't work. The start and end times have to be in seconds.

We do not say anywhere that hh:mm:ss works, to my knowledge:
http://manual.audacityteam.org/m/index. ... cks#export .



Gale

[steve]

Did what you said and the file was opened and applied OK. The strange thing is, once the label track is imported, I can add the apostrophes back using the Edit Label function without any complaint from Audacity. An apostrophe in a song title isn't exactly a rare occurrence!

To clarify, as I often have to, you can have any Unicode character in labels in Unicode versions of Audacity on Unicode operating systems, including Windows 2000 or later. You can have Arabic characters, apostrophes, musical symbols or whatever.

This is a valid Windows file on Windows 2000 or later:

♪♪♪ ' ﷼.wav

There is a restriction that some characters are reserved by the operating system and cannot be used in file names. On Windows, these characters (including double quotes) are illegal in file names and Audacity will not accept them.

Code: Select all

 /  : *  ? " < > |

If you want a double quote in a file name, use two apostrophes.

It is a good idea to stick to file names having Roman letters, numbers, hyphen, dash or underscore if you give the file to anyone else. They may be on some other operating system, or sending such a file over the internet may fail.

In the file "Labels.txt" posted earlier in this thread, the problem characters are in the lines:

Code: Select all

6020.00	6250.00	You’re In My Heart

and

Code: Select all

6561.00	6720.00	Let’s Work Together
6786.00	6907.00	I Guess It Doesn’t Matter Anymore

On Windows this appears similar to:

Code: Select all

6020.00	6250.00	You're In My Heart

and

Code: Select all

6561.00	6720.00	Let's Work Together
6786.00	6907.00	I Guess It Doesn't Matter Anymore

but the "apostrophes" are not normal apostrophes.
A normal apostrophe has the ascii code of 39 decimal (25 Hex), but in Labels.txt the ascii code is 146 decimal (92 Hex)
Ascii code 146 is defined in the extended ascii table as the upper case letter [urlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86]Ash[/url] ("A" abd "E" joined together).
In UTF-8 the character code is a control character.
I don't know why Microsoft think that it is sensible to use character code 146 as a "single quote", but therein lies the problem.
As I said previously, stick with normal letters, numbers, hyphen and underscore to be safe.

[brianejsmith]

Thank you for your very thorough answer and for sticking with this topic.

I did try and achieve UTF-8 output using Note Tab Pro which offers various encoding options but I obviously didn't get it right.

One thing re the issue of seconds or hh:mm:ss; you say that Audacity instructions don't infer hh:mm:ss anywhere and that's true. But the product uses nothing else so it is a little confusing. But, as they say, now I know...

Can you find a moment to respond to my question concerning adding other columns - artist name, album title etc - to the imported labels file? It would be very helpful if this additional information could all be included and imported in one go.

[steve]

A fairly common naming convention is:
<name of artist> - <track title>
so, for example:

Code: Select all

6786.00   6907.00   Buddy Holly - I Guess It Doesnt Matter Anymore

Some tag editor programs are able to automatically read file names and add id3 tags based on the file name.
I rarely use metadata so I can't offer much assistance, but I found these web pages that may be useful:
http://mp3bookhelper.sourceforge.net/
http://mp3bookhelper.sourceforge.net/he ... e2Tag.html