Episode: 1771
Title: HPR1771: Audacity: Label Tracks
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1771/hpr1771.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:05:31

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This is HPR episode 1,771 entitled Audacity Label Tracks and is part of the series
podcasting portal. It is hosted by John Culp and is about 11 minutes long.
The summary is Intro to my Recent Discovery on Label Tracks in Audacity.
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Hey everybody this is John Culp and Lafayette Louisiana and I'm recording yet another HPR
episode. This was just a quickie because I've discovered something that I think is incredibly
useful and it could affect anybody who does podcasting and who uses Audacity and that is the
Label Track. I discovered this yesterday when I was trying to figure out how to group
different tracks in my Audacity project so that they could be synced locked but not synced
locked with every track only in the two groups and I kept running across this term Label Track
and I didn't know what it was so I started looking into it and discovered that it's a really
really useful thing. Label Track is an empty track in other words there is no audio. It is just a
place for you to put annotations and markers to help you realize where stuff is in your project and
and there's other stuff you can do with it later but at first all I wanted to do with it once I
discovered what it could do was to select regions and give them text labels and this allows you to see
without listening to anything what it is that you're talking like if I select a region in my project and
say we're talking about X, Y and Z right here and then over in another region I select it and say
topic is ABC then I don't have to go back and listen to it to figure out what the topic of
conversation was right there I can just jump to it and if you put labels like this consistently
throughout your thing it makes it a lot more efficient to go around and do editing. If you're
anything like me then the way you've done this in the past was to think to yourself well I know
I talked about this somewhere but I can't remember where it was and then I scroll back and forth
all through the file trying to figure out where it was that I was talking about whatever it is
that I need to go back to or edit. With these labels you can put text on there and immediately go
where you want to go so that's incredibly useful you can label either points in the audio or entire
regions to label a point you simply put the cursor there and type control B and start entering text
to label a region you select a region and then do control B and the label applies to that whole
region I should probably back up just a little bit though to enter a label track or to add a label
track you go to the tracks menu and then click new and then sorry add new and then you click label
track and that's going to put a label track at the very bottom of your project and you can move
it up and down what I found is that these label tracks act as sort of barriers to groups of tracks
so if let's say you've got four tracks in your project and you want to group the top two tracks
together and sync lock them so that you can move them together while the other two tracks stay
separate well you would add a label track and then move it up where it's under the second track
and that would effectively group tracks one and two together and leave tracks three and four
out of the grouping that's how you add a label track and then inside the label track you can
add your labels so it's useful not only because you can easily see what you've got there in your
project it's also useful because you can export these text labels as a plain text file and each
one will have a very precise timestamp on it so you could use this to track out the various topics
in your show or you know different song if you're recording like say a whole bunch of songs or
something you could have the timestamps for the beginning of each song marked by labels another
really really cool thing about this is that you can the well here's an example of how I used it
there's an option when you're exporting audio from audacity you may never have used this
I didn't use it until today and I've been using audacity probably for five seven years I
mean a long enough time where I should have seen this before and I actually have seen it I've
just never thought about using it under the file menu there is an option to export multiple
and this is where your labels can really come in handy if you have been selecting entire regions
and giving them labels then when you do the export multiple one of your options is to
export multiple files based on your labels and it will generate separate audio files for every one
of those regions that you have labeled and make the text that you put as the label the title tag
in the outputted audio file and as an example of how you might use this I just a while ago opened up
a recording of one of my university lectures which is about an hour and 15 minutes long and went
through and as the topic of my lecture changed I would apply a new label so I've got seven or eight
different labels on there as I change from one topic to another some of the sections are a couple
of minutes long some are five or six seven minutes long but they're all labeled according to
the topic of my lecture and then I chose to export multiple and it output seven different MP3
files each of which is titled with the topic of my lecture at that point and so this allows me to
serve up little bits of my lectures without having to serve up the entire thing it's a much more
user friendly kind of thing it will allow me to mix and match the different topics freely
anyway I think it's a really really useful tool and something that all of us who contribute to
Hacker Public Radio will find incredibly handy as we prepare our shows and edit them and so forth
I'm going to link to the audacity label tracks documentation and that's probably enough I'm
not going to put a picture or anything because they have one on the documentation page so go
to the show notes and click on that link to go to the documentation and read all about it and
definitely try it in your own work I think you will find it a very very useful thing to do okay
that is it for me bye y'all
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