automatic track detection when digitizing albums

I am using version 3.0.2.0 on OS 10.14.6 - years ago - the last time I used audacity it automagically marked the tracks of an album for me and I just adjusted the gaps - now I cannot figure out how to do that if it still does it - anyone know? I get nice stereo in playback but marking the tracks is too tedious for my Parkinsons fingers to manage - any help will be much appreciated! Thanks in advance!

This turned up in the tutorials on transferring LPs.

https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/label_sounds.html

It describes automatically finding song gaps.

Koz

not at all clear and doesn’t seem to be automagically detecting anything - you have to move the slider blah blah blah - had to read at least 4 pages of additional info and still cannot figure out how to get it to detect anything but single spots in songs or 5 tags at the beginning of a song - nothing else for the whole album - pretty disappointing to have to look for something else!

How did it do that? Was it with “Silence Finder”?
I can send you a copy of Silence Finder if that will help.

it wasn’t the silence it was the music - I frequently had to move its markings to get all of the song at the end but it for sure marked the tracks and not the silence - I am going to give it a try but its seems WAY over complicated - labeling each track before export? That was done on export in the past labeling album and track after choosing those from a menu - it appears now that you have to do that manually after it makes the selection in label sounds?

just did Analyze label sound and the first song has 19 labels on it before it gets to the first gap between songs that’s with default settings

It’s not that easy. If you have worn records, the surface noise in the lead grooves can trick “Silent Sense” software. That and it’s a snap for you and your ears to identify music, but it’s rough to tell software how to do that.

I get it - when you get too many bells and whistles in one program it makes it hard to do something simple (like it used to) but - I exported my first album of about 100 left of a large collection in 320 after burning to disk it was imported at that rate as well so - am pretty happy about that - having taken out pops and clicks and boosted the volume a bit it sounds fantastic - 99 more to go having done nearly 4K! 10 years ago or so!

Audacity used to use a plug-in called “Silence Finder” to add labels at gaps. That plug-in was replaced by “Label Sounds”, but the old effect is still available as an optional plug-in: Missing features - Audacity Support
See the top of that page for download and installation instructions.

following the work flow on one of the pages - seems to be ok - its putting labels at the beginning of the entire recording but has others that are for the tracks - I’ve been deleting the extras and putting the track name in for the others adjusting beginning and end points for each track and leaving the gaps alone - process the tracks with a few presets and boosters removing clicks and pops - export to drive - import to iTunes and then burn to disk for posterity I guess - my library is backed up to a second external drive every night but I think I got it working to certainly save lost albums! Thanks for your help - I appreciate it!

I had two strategies when I was digitixing my LPS

  1. If the LP had track timings, befire recording I would create a label track with the timings specified by the LP/LP cover. Even to the extebt of labelling the songs in advance.

  2. If no track times were available I would add labels for each as the recording progressed. Often I would add the song title at the same time - but you have to be careful not to interrupt the recording.

In both cases it was usually necessary to fine-tune the label positions as part of the editing.

Peter.

Do we have a plug-in for that?
Is there a standard format that records use for listing track times?



No I don’t believe so - but I so recall a fairly recent posting from a Forum user who developed a fancy Macro for doinf that (but I can’t find it now)

Not AFAIK, nope - all mine varied by records label as far as I can recall (I was doing the 14-15 years ago and may ageing memory is hazy)
And not all of them had timings.

Peter

when you analyze for tracks it works pretty good - today I had to find the missed break and drag from the following track to relabel - then continue to the end - pretty hard to do that and the zoom out has increments that are too large to get to see the whole album but not be able to see the breaks or move the labels - just my observation

Audacity has lots of options for zooming. The most obvious being the zoom in / out buttons, but I find those a bit clunky (not very fine control, and having to hit a small target to click on).

Mostly I use “Ctrl + mouse wheel”, which I find very quick and convenient. When there’s a selection, Audacity will try to keep the selection visible on screen, which is helpful.

When zooming in, you can make a selection then press “Ctrl + E”, which is a really quick way to zoom into a region of interest. There’s also “Ctrl + F” to Fit the entire project on screen.

Other options are described in the manual, but I find that the above are the only ones that I use. See: Zooming Overview - Audacity Manual

Thanks for the pointers - the keyboard commands are helpful - have noticed there are lots of them but the ones you suggested which I hadn’t seen yet will be helpful - am following the sample workflow from one of the pages with a couple additions and am getting faster at fixing the mistakes audacity makes in selecting tracks vs low sound in a track -

last night I did one that had 28 selected tracks when there were only 11 - zooming out to delete the ones not needed and then stretching those for the tracks that are needed placing them in the gaps while listening -

it would be helpful if when you use the space bar to start playback that when you stop playback the selection bar stayed where you stopped it so when moving the selection markers to the playback spot was more precise instead of having to hit play and move the selection several times to get the right spot and when typing in track names if spell check worked in the track name boxes that would help a lot -

my old diseased eyes - even with glasses can barely read inside the boxes so spell check and replacement would help but I may be asking too much huh - I made a mistake in one of the album names and imported it to iTunes -

when I changed the name I missed selecting one track but all of them got uploaded to the cloud - it took me about 5 tries to change that one tracks album name before it got uploaded to replace the previous upload - anyway - thanks for your help and I so appreciate the program now that I can use it and can see more usefulness in the future with podcasts when I start those after the albums are done - we shall see eh - best of intentions -

have a blessed day!

“X marks the spot!”
Press the “X” key to stop at the current play position.

Thanks for the keyboard commands - they are helpful as is the X marks the spot one - way back maybe 8 years ago - you didn’t have to label the tracks - just mark them and on export the album and tracks were detected and you could pick from a list which album it was and it would add the labels before export - similar to when importing to iTunes it gives you a choice from those available - is that still in the program somewhere?

Sorry, but I’ve been regularly using Audacity since version 1.2.4 (2005) and I’ve never heard of that feature. :confused:

I didn’t start digitizing my over 4000 albums till after 2010 so it was either a plug in or another program - whatever I was using while being treated for cancer and after was pretty easy like audacity but had that feature - I still cant type very well but am getting buy and faster with what I have to work with now - thanks for all your help!