Audacity Forum

I primarily use Audacity to capture and record vinyl albums, cassettes, 8-tracks, and even sometimes the audio output from Laserdiscs.

If I have a noisy recording, I often end up with a random number of labels after running Sound Finder. I then set about moving the labels, deleting labels that are not needed, adding new labels etc.

What would be really useful is a simple renumber labels option that could be run from the labels menu, and rerun as often as needed.

An additionally useful option would be to be able to give a start number. By default this would be 1, but could be changed to any number for example 10. This would be useful when recording the sides of a vinyl record as separate projects and then exporting the tracks to the same folder.

Here is one I just finished with Audacity 3.0 - there are nine tracks in the final recording, label 1, 7 and 10were deleted, and an additional label was added after label-6. Yeah I know I could type the numbers from scratch and yes I know I could have moved/changed label 7 to be in the position I needed it, but I'd already deleted and made other changes.

4MC wrote: ↑

Wed Apr 07, 2021 7:11 pm

If I have a noisy recording, I often end up with a random number of labels after running Sound Finder.

You may get better results with the new "Label Sounds" tool in Audacity 3.0.0: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/label_sounds.html
The "Threshold measurement:" setting has an option for "Average level" which makes it less sensitive to pops and crackles.

4MC wrote: ↑

Wed Apr 07, 2021 7:11 pm

What would be really useful is a simple renumber labels option that could be run from the labels menu, and rerun as often as needed.

You can rename labels manually with the Labels Editor : https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/labels_editor.html
Not as fast as automatic renumbering, but most albums have less than 20 tracks, so should be fairly quick to do.

4MC wrote: ↑

Wed Apr 07, 2021 7:11 pm

An additionally useful option would be to be able to give a start number.

You can do that with the new "Label Sounds" tool in Audacity 3.0.0.

steve wrote: ↑

Wed Apr 07, 2021 7:35 pm

You may get better results with the new "Label Sounds" tool in Audacity 3.0.0: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/label_sounds.html
The "Threshold measurement:" setting has an option for "Average level" which makes it less sensitive to pops and crackles.

Since I primarily use it as the final step in macro's and each album if different, I'm not sure that actually solves my problem. I tried using it on the project shown in the OP, and still can't get it to produce the right number of labels to match the number of tracks, so I end up deleting, adding etc. which would still benefit from a renumber option.

steve wrote: ↑

Wed Apr 07, 2021 7:35 pm

You can rename labels manually with the Labels Editor : https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/labels_editor.html
Not as fast as automatic renumbering, but most albums have less than 20 tracks, so should be fairly quick to do.

Well it turns out the alt up/down-cursor skips between rows in the same cell. But not in edit mode

Unless I'm missing a key combination skipping from row to row and staying in the label column of the editor, it's really not that quick. You either have to tab from cell to cell or type the new number and click with the mouse on the cell below.

If adding options to the Label menu isn't desirable, having renumber an option in the label editor would be an alternative.

I currently use an external tool to fix this, but it would be great if it was the final action before export multiple inside Audacity.

4MC wrote: ↑

Wed Apr 07, 2021 7:58 pm

Unless I'm missing a key combination skipping from row to row and staying in the label column of the editor, it's really not that quick.

Say you have a load of labels and you want to name them: 1, 2, 3, 4....

1. Open "Edit Labels"
2. Double click on the label text of the first label
3. Type: 1
4. Press "Enter"
5. Press "F2"
6. Type 2
7. Press "Enter"
8. Press "F2"
9. Type 3
10. Press "Enter"
11. Press "F2"
12. Type 4
13. ...

You could make it even quicker with AutoHotKey by setting a keyboard shortcut to send an "Enter" key press followed by an "F2" key press, but that's perhaps going overboard.

steve wrote: ↑

Wed Apr 07, 2021 9:08 pm

Say you have a load of labels and you want to name them: 1, 2, 3, 4....

1. Open "Edit Labels"
2. Double click on the label text of the first label
3. Type: 1
4. Press "Enter"
5. Press "F2"
6. ...

For some reason my system doesn't need the F2.
Enter first/enter/second/enter etc. does it.

Thats still some 24 keystorkes to renumber a 11 track album. If AutoHotKey could be setup to always label from 1-12 plus all the enters that might be a solution, but I don't need a 3rd party product, I often use MP3TAG and it just changes the actual track number tag and then I can rename the file with that.

I still though have to run it for each project, thats twice if I record the sides as separate projects. Personally I'd rather see it in Audacity, I'll wait I've been using it this way for 4-years... I was hoping the new Label Sounds might help, but not.