Episode: 3291
Title: HPR3291: The New Audacity and Batch Processing Macros
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3291/hpr3291.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 20:17:24

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This is Haka Public Radio Episode 3291 for Monday the 15th of March 2021.
Today's show is entitled The New Audacity and Match Processing Macros.
It is hosted by a huker and is about 8 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summer is a brief look at the new audacity and how I got it working for me.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
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Hello, this is a hukar welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio in another exciting episode.
This is going to be about something that just happened to me.
I ran into a problem and found a solution and now I'm going to share that with you.
It has to do with audacity, which I'm sure most people on Hacker Public Radio are pretty
familiar with.
It's a really wonderful open source audio processing program and I use it every day for a variety
of reasons.
First of all, I use audacity to record and prepare my own podcast shows, which are pretty
much for Hacker Public Radio and I seem to have done over 200 shows.
I'm still actively recording shows.
I expect to continue as long as I can, though at the age of 69 I can see that there may come
an end sooner rather than later.
Now, audacity does a great job for me.
My method is pretty simple.
Generally, what I do first is I write out what I want to say and it can be either a page or
a blog post, depending on what I'm doing.
This one is a blog post, for instance.
And I write it out because, you know, as a former academic, I like to get my thoughts
together before I start doing the recording.
So this is the workflow I use.
But, you know, once I do that, I just take my blue snowball microphone, plug it into my
Kabuntu box, open up audacity and press the record button.
And it records everything and when I'm done, I'll just add a little bit of a volume boost,
save the project and then export the flack file for upload to hacker public radio.
Now, that's not something I do every day, but I do it often enough.
But what gets it to the every day is the other use I have and that is for listening to podcasts.
I listen to a lot of podcasts and even when I weed out the ones that just go on for too long,
it's still hard to keep up.
You know, I've eliminated all of the Twitch network podcasts I used to listen to because I,
you know, they consider two hours a short one.
And, you know, I prefer not to have to listen to that much at any one time from one person.
So, one of the things I like to do is I like to speed up the podcasts.
Now, I know that there are people who use smartphone apps that have the built-in ability to speed
up podcasts in the app and, you know, that's fine, but I don't listen to podcasts on my phone.
And the reason is that, you know, I like my phone to get through the day with the battery,
you know, still providing power.
Now, is that less of an issue now that I'm retired?
Yeah, probably, but, you know, it's a matter of habit.
And what I like is I like these small inexpensive MP3 players.
And I can just clip them onto my shirt or, you know, I might be working in the yard,
you know, mowing the lawn or, you know, weeding or doing housework, whatever.
And I just listen to podcast while I'm doing that.
You know, I was a big fan of the Sansa Clip Plus, which unfortunately, Sansa stopped making.
And so, I found something that's very similar called a clientop.
You know, it's probably made in China, but it's inexpensive. It gets the job done very nicely.
But it does not have the built-in ability to speed up podcasts. So what I did is I set up
audacity to do that. So what I do is I download my podcast using G Potter on my Kabuntu box.
And about once a day, I will delete the ones I finished listening to and prepare a new bunch to
load on the player. And audacity prepares them. I created what they call the chain some years back
on the old version of audacity, which would take the files, speed them up by 70% boost the volume a
bit and then export the finished file. And I could do it as a batch process on whole directory of files.
You would open the files one at a time, apply the chain, and then move on to the next file. This
was very handy. Then I made the jump from Kabuntu 1804 to Kabuntu 2004. Now, I tend to stick to LTS
releases and be fairly conservative because I would rather use my computer to do things
than spend my time fixing software issues. And LTS releases work well for me in this respect.
In fact, I did not move from 1804 to 2004 until February of 2021.
And with the operating system upgrade came the software upgrades, including audacity.
And when I went looking for chains, they weren't there. I did some investigating on the web and
found that they were replaced by macros. And instead of being on the file menu, they were on
the tools menu, which is reasonable enough, I guess. I looked in the tools menu, found apply macro.
And when I opened that, I found that my chains all had been moved over to macros,
which was great since I did not have to recreate any of them. Not that it would be that difficult to do,
but still, I was appreciative of the effort. But I can only apply a macro to one file at a time.
The process seemed to be that I had to open a file, then apply the macro.
And when I tried to do that to a directory with about 20 files in it, each file opened
separately in its own window, which was a big mess right there. And then I had to go through
them one at a time to apply the macro and then close the window. Ugg. Now as I considered this,
it did occur to me that they're all likely that I was doing it all wrong and that the capability
was still there. So I went to the Audacity Forum, a link in the show notes for that, or anyone who
wants to know, where I did see some references to batch processing, but none of them ever explained
how to do that. So I started searching for Audacity batch processing, and the first few results
got me nowhere. They either went back to the page that referred to batch processing without
explaining how to do it, or they went back to the older version with chains.
But then I found a YouTube video called Audacity Macros, easily apply effects to multiple files,
which is exactly what I was looking for. And again, a link in the show notes if you want to check
out that video. And that's where I got my answer. So on the tools menu, there was another option,
it's just called Macros. And selecting this opened a window called Manage Macros,
and on the bottom there was a section to apply the macro to, and you could either do it to the
current project or to a group of files. And if I select group of files, I can just open the directory,
select all of the files, and it works just the way it used to. So it was there all along. I just missed
it. But in case someone out there in Hacker Public Radio land has been facing a similar problem
to what I faced, here's the answer. So this is a hook-up for Hacker Public Radio,
signing off, and as always encouraging you to support FreeSoftware. Bye-bye.
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