editing

[frw007]

I am just starting to use this software for recording voiceovers. When I mess up, I want to cut out that part and pick up recording where I left off. Problem is when I do that, it deletes the portion I want left in and only records the new stuff. What am I doing wrong? Thanks for your help.

[kozikowski]

If you Stop and Record again, Audacity will open a whole new timeline underneath the one you were on before. If you Pause with the P key, Audacity will stop recording and then pick up again when you P the second time.

You can Stop and then pick up at the end of the original track with Append Record (Shift-R). So those are the options. That sounds like the one you want. You want to cut out the fluff and place the new work at the end of the old.

Audacity 2.1.2 also has the ability to stop and place the cursor anywhere in the old work and when you Record, it starts a new track at that location, not automatically at the beginning.

Audacity will not Smash Record which is what everybody wants. Place the cursor in the old work and just record over everything after that.

It could be said you should put the editing off until later to avoid missing the rhythm of the presentation. In that case make the fluff, mark it with a label, announce the corrected speech and just keep going.

http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/label_tracks.html

Use the labels as a marker of where the corrections are needed in later post production.

Koz

[kozikowski]

Post production editing is a better deal than you think because getting the rhythm and timing of live speech to match is not easy. If you miss it either way the speech sounds awkward and if you miss it the wrong way you're stuck with cutting and pasting room tone or worse, making new room tone so the patch doesn't stick out.

Koz

[frw007]

On a 60 sec spot, if I mess up at the :40 second mark, I want to keep the first :40 and record the last 20 Sec new. I want to delete the last 20 sec, the re record. It sounded OK when I did it once but I haven't been able to figure out how I did it the first time. Will the above ideas accomplish what I want?

[kozikowski]

I figured out what you want. It's what everybody else wants.

When you make the fluff, Stop the recording. Go into careful editing, Zoom if you need to and carefully remove the fluff audio down to the point you want to rejoin. Pick a point at the zero-crossing line (in the middle of the timeline).

You might want to turn off Refresh the Screen. That makes most people nuts when they're trying to tight edit word by word. Edit > Preferences > Tracks > [_]Update...... (de-select).

Stop.

Shift-R, Append record. Audacity will pick up fresh recording at that exact point.

Fair warning you need to do this between words or phrases and not in the middle of a word or tight sentence. Those edits are impossible to make sound good and if you offend the sound gods, you'll get a click or pop because of mismatched waves.



The top one will pop or click and the bottom one won't. You will get comfortable with zooming and detailed editing and wave management. It sounds like doing it on the fly is a good thing and many times it is, but not always.

Koz

[frw007]

I will try it and it sounds like exactly what I'm looking for. I will edit between sentences...makes it easier...THANKS!

[kozikowski]

The ideal on-the-fly edit has you putting the "Edit-In" point somewhere in the existing show and pressing an Edit button instead of Record (I'm making some of this up). Audacity automatically backs up, say three seconds, rolls playback and automatically switches to record three seconds later. This gives you the theatrical rhythm lead-in to join the edit with little or no error.

It's a cousin to Overdubbing/Sound-On-Sound where you play all the instruments of the band yourself one after the other and Audacity just piles them up as you perform them. So we do have some pieces of this already down.

Audacity doesn't have sticky Edit Points either. That's something else which horrifies the video people when they start using Audacity.

Koz