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hpr1771 :: Audacity: Label Tracks

Intro to my recent discovery of "Label Tracks" in Audacity

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Hosted by Jon Kulp on 2015-05-18 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
Audacity, audio editing, podcasting. 4.
The show is available on the Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/hpr1771

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Duration: 00:11:23

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Label Tracks in Audacity

I don't know if I'm ignorant and everyone else already knows about this, but I decided to record a quick show about Audacity "Label Tracks," something I discovered while working on another HPR episode today.

The label track is one of the most useful things I've found in a long time. It allows you to annotate your audio project so that you can quickly see important spots or summarize the contents of whole segments and see at a glance what they are about without hunting all over the place and playing things back, trying to find the part where you were talking about X,Y, or Z. You can also export the labels as a plain text file with exact timestamps. I have not tried this, but according to the documentation you can also use labels to mark the beginnings of separate songs in a long track and export multiple separate files at once from a single source based on the labels.

To add a label track, go to the Tracks menu and select Add New --> Label Track, and it will add the label track to the bottom of your list of tracks. To add a label, either stick the cursor where you want the label to be and press ctrl+b to add text, or select a region to label by clicking and dragging over a region in the label track, then do ctrl+b to start typing the label text.

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Comment #1 posted on 2015-05-18 10:12:46 by Dave Morriss

Very useful

This was very useful, thanks.

I have used Audacity a moderate amount but hadn't noticed this feature. I have used labels for the last show I edited, which consisted of several pieces I wanted to join together. Being able to label them was very helpful, especially since some parts needed silence removal, and so on, and some did not.

Comment #2 posted on 2015-05-25 07:10:36 by kdmurray

Can't believe I've never seen this

I've been using Audacity to edit podcasts and other audio for almost a decade and have never seen this feature. Thanks for sharing with us Jon!

Comment #3 posted on 2015-06-12 16:42:00 by Urugami

Thanks for doing this show. I've been familiar with label tracks since I created my first one by accident many moons ago, but they never really lent themselves to what I've doing in Audacity since then. However, it seems they could help me when I start to digitize my cassette collection.

Comment #4 posted on 2020-11-19 18:15:52 by Ken Fallon

Yes - found it

I *knew* someone did a show about this. I should have guessed.

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