I have this simple, yet crazy problem. Could you help me?

[CGraco]

Whats up, fellas.

I have a very,very long speech in one track (track one), and a piece of this same speech in other track (track two). I need to find, "in track one", where "track two" belongs... in which part of the speech "track two" was said, you know.

Since i dont want to listen to the whole speech (2 hours + long), i'm trying to figure out a way to find where, in the speech, "track two" was said through matching sound waves.

It's logic to think that the specific sound wave of "track two" is similar to the sound wave made when the same words were said in "track one", right?

Am i being clear enought here? Lol...sorry if my explanation is being a little confusing... english is not my native language!

So..is it possible to make this "searching via sound wave''? And, maybe... using audacity as the tool?

[kozikowski]

similar to the sound wave

That's what kills you. It's a simple arithmetic function to pick out two exact, wave for wave matches, but the real world never works like that. Any difference at all and it becomes a task to match meanings and inflections and other clues. Much more difficult.

Both pieces are MP3, right? MP3 destroys waveform integrity and it's different for every performance and compression quality.

What are the two shows? How did you get the two files?

Koz

[CGraco]

got it.


yeah, they are mp3 files. And i think that "track two" got some noise removal - which makes the situation even worse, lol.

I got it from a friend. He gave a speech in a university last month.

In a situation like that, is there a quick way of finding where "track 2" belongs in the the speech? Or, in 2013, will i need to listen to 2+ hours of talk,talk,talk.... (about a subject that isnt interesting at all, by the way...haha)?

[kozikowski]

We can put a Man on the Moon and we can't match two voice tracks.

You're not actually matching two tracks. They're way too different now. You're matching the meaning of two tracks. Just the fact that nobody jumped in to correct me means you need to make fresh coffee and start listening to the show.

Can you get anything at all from the meanings?

"This is in the third part of the show where he talks about Nuclear Bond Degeneration in Marigold Plants."

Notice I've avoided asking you why you would need to do this. As a forum policy we don't get involved in legal actions.

Koz

[Robert J. H.]

How Long is the second track that should be found?

[waxcylinder]

You could try using the Transcription Toolbar to play back track-1 faster - see: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/tr ... olbar.html

The key thing about this is that it only temporarily affects playback and does not change the underlying recorded track(s)

Also if you definitely know that track-2 wasn't in the first hour (or wherever) you can skip to start playing (or using the Transcription Toolbar) from there. Perhaps the easiest way is to use the Selection Toolbar to set the Selection Start Time - see: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/se ... olbar.html

But personally what I myself would do (provided that the track-2 was long enough to spot) I would fit the whole project on the Audacity Window - see the Fit Project at the foot of this page: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/ed ... ml#zoomfit

and then prod around in the Timeline at various points to find where the track-2 section is in track-1 - when you click in the Timeline Audacity will start playing from there - see: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/timeline.html

You can mark the track-2 section within track-1 with labels to note where it is - see: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/label_tracks.html

WC

[CGraco]

Wow....nice.

I'll try it man. Thanks!

And by the way.... what i want to do is totally legal man... haha'...dont worry.

[kozikowski]

We get postings that are very secretive about wanting to "clean up" a sound file and later it turns out they're trying to sue their landlord or ex-wife. We can't do forensics no matter what it's used for. Koz