How to Select a Region By-The-Numbers in Audacity (Free Sound Processor)

Self ^ | 11/12/2014 | Charles O'Connell

[CharlesOConnell]

 The worst rub is the learning curve. There needs to be a hierarchy of the most common tasks.

 Audacity is free, open source, cross-platform software for recording and editing sounds.

  "Audacity is available for Windows, Mac, Linux; and other operating systems. Check their feature list, wiki, and forum."

 Audacity is a great success, a user-community produced and managed application program that does what it's supposed to.

 Years ago you used to have to pay for this software, now it's free, but you have to invest your time in learning how to use it.

 The worst rub is the learning curve.

 So many times, it seems impossible to find Help for the simplest tasks. (Try using Microsoft's internal "Help" system—abysmal!)

 There needs to be a hierarchy of the most common tasks.

 In this instance, I just wanted to set a selection span in Audacity by the numbers:

• I gave a preliminary listen to the raw recording (an event I recorded on a little sound recorder).
• I looked at the visual appearance of the wave form for spikes/peaks that would help me queue the selection I wanted.
• (There are zoom-in & out controls, using keyboard shortcuts.)
• I wrote down my beginning and ending selection numbers.
  • Beginning: 9:58
  • Ending: 13:09
• Now, how do I actually select that region, so I can copy it to a new Audacity file, for enhancing the sound and outputting to an MP3?

 I tried to learn how to do this from the simple search term audacity select numbers.

 The results were more confusing than if I had tried trial & error—which is what I did.

 Here's how you do it.

1. Set your Selection Start and End numbers, with the End (not Length) radio button set.
2. Edit > Select > In All Tracks

Now you can Copy (it takes a minute), then Ctrl N (for a new instance of the program) and Paste.

 

[CharlesOConnell]

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words, But a Song is Worth a Million.

[Paladin2]

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

[bigbob]

Thanks, I always end up deleting the wrong part!

[Sans-Culotte]

Bump for later.

[zeugma]

Audacity is one of the easiest programs I've ever used for simple sound edits. I process the sermons for my church every week. We record the entire service, then I break out individual parts to upload them to our webserver. To highlight a selection, just click on the point you want to start, then go to to where you want to end. Hold down the shift key and click. Everything between the two marks will be highlighted. It works exactly like text in any document. In other words, if you want to select from one point to the end, you just click where you want to start, then [shift]-[end], and everything you want is selected. Use control-c to copy, and control-v to paste into a new recording if you want. Or select the bits you don't want, then hit delete.

Once you have everyhing you want, you can use control-a to select the entire recording, and select 'effect' then 'amplify' to boost the levels of everything.

For simple edits, audacity is easy. It's when you start doing multi-track stuff that things can get more complex.