Collaborative audio editing in Audacity
I’ve started producing a podcast with Huw Jordan, and at the moment we’re recording interviews for our second episode.
I live in Hampshire and Huw lives in London, so we needed a way to share audio files from interviews and work on rough edits without having to send huge project files back and forth all the time.
It turns out that sharing an Apple Lossless version of our raw interview through a shared Dropbox folder, then using Audacity to generate a text file containing a list of edits, is a pretty lightweight method of doing this. Here are the notes I’ve written on how to do it (mostly so I don’t forget).
What
This is an easy way for us to edit raw interviews down to the good bits on PC or Mac, share the edits, and then get them into the software I’ll use for the final mix.
Why
There are plenty of ways of chopping up sound files, but using labels in Audacity in the way I’ve described here means we can:
Send edits between programs and Windows / Mac
Preserve the entire original recording so I can do fades etc (non-destructive editing)
Keep Dropbox space usage and uploading / downloading time to a minimum
Annotate clips, and get those annotations to show up in Final Cut
Edit on any computer with free software
How
1. Download and install the newest version of Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
2. Open the recording in Audacity: File → Open. If Audacity asks you how you want to import it, choose ‘read the files directly from the original’.
3. Start playing the recording. When you get to a good bit, go to Tracks → Add label at playback position (in the menu it should show you a keyboard shortcut for doing this). Type something short that’ll make sense later and remind us which bit it is, then press enter. You can do all this without stopping playback.
4. When you get to the end of the section you think we should use, add another label and call it ‘cut’.
5. Repeat for the whole recording. Every section of good audio should start with a descriptive label or transcribed speech and end with a ‘cut’ label. It should end up looking like this:
6. When you’re done, do File → Export labels. Name the file as the interviewee’s name, e.g. ‘Graham labels’, and save it to the desktop.
7. As long as you’ve saved the labels file, you can safely close Audacity. It’ll ask you if you want to save an Audacity project file but there’s no need to do this.
8. Import the original unedited recording into iTunes. Then, in the iTunes preferences, under Import Settings, tell it to import using Apple Lossless Encoder. Go to the file you just imported in iTunes, right-click it, and click Create Apple Lossless Version. Drag the file iTunes just created to the desktop.
9. Make a folder in the Dropbox podcast folder and name it e.g. Harry Cole.
10. Move the Apple Lossless file and the Labels file into the Dropbox folder.
Result
I can open the file and the labels in Audacity, move or change labels and add my own, then get Audacity to automatically chop the recording into bits for importing into Final Cut. The end result in Final Cut is this:
If you want to get Audacity to chop the file for your own reference, just do File → export multiple, choose the export location, tell it to split files based on Labels, and to name files with Numbering before Label/Track Name. Untick overwrite existing files. Keep clicking OK every time it asks you to edit metadata. You’ll end up with a bunch of audio files, like this:
Writing longer notes
For lengthier notes it’s still best to use Google Docs, but you can import the Labels text file you generated with Audacity into Google Docs and add further notes, e.g.:
68.954845 68.954845 uhh never
This might be good for something
73.505956 73.505956 cut 111.005982 111.005982 where were you when you decided
He went off on a giant tangent here about walking the length of Britain… not really relevant but could overlap bits of this
How to open and change edits I’ve made
Open the recording in Audacity then click File → Import → Labels and select the labels text file for the recording. When you’re done making changes, export the labels file and name it as e.g. ‘Graham labels 2’.