Audacity Forum

Hi folks,

Seems like I have committed a rather grave mistake of applying noise gate on the whole interview with the threshold a bit too high, which led to some of the words lightly uttered by the speaker got cut off. I realized this when I have edited (just trimming the silent parts on the track) 1/2 of the 2 hours interview.

Now I still keep the original recording project in a local server, so in worst case, I would have to re-cut the audio track again (this time without the noise gate filter, just to be safe). But is it possible for me to somehow re-import the original audio, with the trimming applied same as the project I am working on?

re-import the original audio

If you didn't close Audacity, you should be able to Edit > UNDO back to the original work. If you did close Audacity, it cleans out all the production caches and memory, and you're stuck.


Open your edit and then pull down the interview. The imported audio should appear as a new track underneath your edit. Get strong coffee and Time Shift (two sideways black arrows) the new track until it aligns with the edit. Then delete here and there until you're back to what you want.

You may find that you want to burn it off, hose it down and start over. Many times patch jobs aren't worth it.

If you still have the original interview in any form you got insanely lucky. Count the forum posts where the Very Important Interview is gone.

Next time you do this, Export a WAV (not MP3) of the work before you mess with it.

Koz