Audacity To Split Tracks

[bilbal]

I am trying to figure out how to take a single track recording of a show and split it up into individual song tracks. I was told to download and use Audacity. I just tried to do it and I got frustrated. Does anyone here know how to use this program and can give me some pointers to get started?

Thanks,
Bill

[Blue Strat]

I haven't used Audacity, but is there a "split" function (right click?)? If there is, insert a "split" wherever you want to seperate songs then copy/cut and paste individual songs into different/new tracks. This is how you would do it in Sonar. Not sure if the "split" term is universal or not.

[bbarnard]

Find the point where you want the song to start. Click there. Use either the arrow keys or the mouse to highlight to the end of that particular song. Copy. Open a new file. Paste. Save to format of choice. Single song now saved. Done.

The split function is for splitting joined stereo tracks into individual tracks or cutting that section out and replacing it with silence. It sounded to me like the OP had a single track (stereo or otherwise) with multiple songs that he wanted to split into individual songs. Using my method will do that. Highlight the area you want to save then copy and paste into a new track. That will put the song in its own track. Then it can be saved.

[Suproman77]

Alright, I'm going to lay this out simple and easy.

Before doing anything, you need to be sure that Audacity is setup properly. Go under Edit > Preferences and check out the settings under 'File Formats' and 'Quality'. Not going to get into all this here since you can read that in the help tutorial, but the 'Uncompressed Export Format' is especially important...I usually use 32-bit Float Wav or FLAC for maximum quality. Once that is set the way you want it....

1. Go to File > Open and browse for the file you want to work on. Once selected, it should appear in a new track as a waveform.

2. Make sure you have the selection tool selected. It's in the top lefthand corner of the screen and looks like an 'I'.

3. Start at the beginning of a song, click the mouse and hold it, then drag the mouse over until you've reached the end of the song.

4. Once the area is selected, go up to Edit > Copy

5. Go to File > New

6. Go to Edit > Paste and now the split track to should be there.

7. If you want to make any adjusts to the track at this point, you can. For instance, you can use the Time Shift tool which looks like this "<->". With that selected you can move the track backwards or forwards in time. With the selection tool, you can also add silence to the begining or end of the track by highlighting an area outside of the track and then selecting Generate > Silence.

8. Finally, go to File > Export Wav, Export FLAC, or Export MP3. In order to export as an MP3, you need to have the Lame MP3 encoder installed which you can get here: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/faq?s=install&item=lame-mp3 (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/faq?s=install&item=lame-mp3)

9. Repeat the process over and over to get all the individual tracks seperated.

There, hope I covered everything. Read the tutorial provided on the website for detailed questions though...it's very good and how I learned to use the program.