Making Two Shorter Tracks Into One Longer Track

[craigab]

I am a full-blown Audacity novice. My operating system is Windows 7. As I have only JUST NOW learned, I have an 'obsolete' version of Audacity (1.3 Beta [Unicode]). I know this means that I need to get the current version as soon as possible. But, I have an Audacity project that I just created with this older version and I think I have to use what I have at the moment to edit this one project. I had intended to record something as one track. But, I accidentally clicked the Stop button instead of the Pause button. Consequently, I ended up with a second track, within the same project. All I want to do now is unite these two tracks (the second one following the first one), so that I end up with the one extended track that I had wanted, in the first place. Each track is about 15 minutes long; I just want to have one track which will of course be about 30 minutes long. I have honestly looked at about ten tutorials, print and video, and have done -- to the best of my understanding -- what these tutorials say to do, to no avail. I have even obtained a copy of Carla Schroder's "A Book Of Audacity" and have tried various things from it -- again, to no avail. (I can not even determine if what I am trying to do, in Audacity terms, is Joining, Aligning, Adding, Moving, or something else. This may not even matter, since I think I have tried all of these without getting my desired outcome.) I apologize to the Audacity community for using this 'obsolete' version and promise that I will be obtaining a new version. I hope that someone is willing to help me with this one task that (I hope) will be simple to execute.

[steve]

Audacity 2.0.6 will open projects made with 1.3.x.

Because 1.3.x is so old you will need to uninstall it before installing 2.0.6 (usually you can just install over the top of the old version, but not from 1.3.x to 2.x).

Audacity is a multi-track audio editor, so it is designed to handle multiple tracks.
When you "Export" your finished masterpiece, all tracks that are not muted will be "mixed down" into a single file. Obviously you don't want your two tracks to play at the same time, so you just need to slide your second track to the right so that it plays as soon as the first track finished. To move the track to the right, zoom out far enough so that you can see what you are doing (http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/zooming.html), then use the Time Shift tool to drag the second track to the right.

[craigab]

Thank you so very much for your response. I have already figured out how to Time Shift, after substantially Zooming Out, the second track to a point after the first track is finished. But, when I click on Play, it plays both tracks simultaneously. And I think that this is inherent so long as they remain separate tracks within one project. Is it not possible to create one 'combined' track from the two, resulting in there being only one track in the project?

[steve]

I presume that you are starting with something similar to this:

trackpanel000.png (17.56 KiB) Viewed 441 times

You need to "time shift" the second track so that it looks something like this:

trackpanel001.png (17.77 KiB) Viewed 441 times

[craigab]

Thank you very, very much with your very helpful advice. But, I seem to be having a new problem. When I "export" this to be a "Wave" file, it cancels this change. It plays the two tracks simultaneously, as if the time-shift never happened. Is there anything I can do about this, or, do I just have to keep it as an Audacity file?

[steve]

To avoid confusion and other complications, when you export (File menu > Export Audio), ensure that you use a new and unique file name.