auplabels – extract times of tracks in an Audacity file for adding labels

auplabels – extract times of tracks in an Audacity file for adding labels (download).

Audacity 1.3’s method of track splitting has always seemed a pain, so I wrote the above to help me.

Running auplabels file.aup will generate a somewhat sparse file of track offsets:

0.00000000
191.57333333
376.08000000
550.76000000

You’ll want to edit this to add track names (there should be a tab between the first column and the title):

0.00000000      Battle of the Blues
191.57333333    I Quit My Job
376.08000000    Ain't Goin' My Way
550.76000000    Wake Up Hill

If you use File -> Import… -> Labels… to import this into your project, the label track should exactly align with your track splits.

(Of course, this should really be an XML application since Audacity AUP files are XML, but issues were had.)

2 comments

  1. Just discovered there’s a tool that will merge two files as columns. ‘pr’ will merge lines side by side. If you maintain the track names in a simple text file, you can make the input that Audacity needs using:

    pr -t -m auplabels_output.txt track_names.txt > merged.txt

  2. you can also use the ‘paste’ command.

    Note that Audacity doesn’t like purely numeric track labels – it really isn’t happy with Robyn Hitchcock’s song 1974 …

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