Calling all macro users

[ChrisGreaves]

I am new to LibriVox but not to Audacity, and absolutely not new to macros. My life is macros; LibriVox is just a very rewarding pastime!

I am establishing a set of macro-commands in Audacity 3.1.3 and this thread is an assembly-point for LibriVox members who might want a macro written for them, might want help in writing macros in Audacity, or might be prepared to share their knowledge of macros with LibriVox members. I started work with macros in 1968/69 but only at 3:30a.m today did I learn that Audacity has macros. (There is a danger that LibriVox might lose me as a volunteer PL/R/DPL/etc. at this point )

What prompted me to want a macro?
I record a page of complicated text and save it to a WAV file, and after a dozen or so pages, edit all the WAV files before assembling them into a single MP3 file.

(a) I want to reduce all gaps greater than (say) two seconds down to exactly two seconds, which would reduce my recorded pauses while I mentally rehearse some German pronunciation, or work out where the next batch of commas should have been placed
(b) I want to set all gaps less than two seconds to a fixed 0.5 seconds, which would make all sentence gaps a fixed length.

This, as you can imagine, is a Boring And Repetitive Task, and cries out loud for a macro.

As does the task of making the starting silence 0.5 to 1 seconds and the ending silence 5 seconds.

Now, please excuse me while I go and read through a few topics.
Thanks
Chris Greaves

[knotyouraveragejo]

Chris, you can do what you want with your own recordings, but having all the gaps between sentences exactly uniform is not how one normally speaks and will also presumably remove all the breaths in these "gaps", which will therefore not sound natural. Also if your plan is to add silence, as opposed to room "noise" the resulting recordings will then sound like you are switching the audio on and off between sentences.

[silverquill]

(a) I want to reduce all gaps greater than (say) two seconds down to exactly two seconds, which would reduce my recorded pauses while I mentally rehearse some German pronunciation, or work out where the next batch of commas should have been placed
(b) I want to set all gaps less than two seconds to a fixed 0.5 seconds, which would make all sentence gaps a fixed length.

This, as you can imagine, is a Boring And Repetitive Task, and cries out loud for a macro.

As does the task of making the starting silence 0.5 to 1 seconds and the ending silence 5 seconds.

Chris Greaves

Well, I do agree with Jo.
The object is to have a natural sounding narration.

Editing is a huge part of the process, and I personally don't see how such macros would help. For a natural flow, you will want to have variable gaps between word, phrases, sentences and paragraphs. I huge part of what I do in editing is just that, and listening after the edits to make sure the flow sounds natural. Perhaps you could use macros to do some rough editing, but you would still want to do the fine tuning any way, I would think. And, adjusting the silences is just a matter of having extra at both ends and trimming. Whatever approach you take, just keep in mind what the final outcome is that you're aiming for.

My two-cents

[philchenevert]

Chris, macros are indeed good. I rely on AutoHot Keys to edit with and they are absolute sanity savers. I assume they fall under the term 'macro' of course. A key stroke zooms me in and another zooms me out, a combination of two deletes mistakes, uses the z key for zero crossing, and then zooms back out, etc. They are invaluable to me as time savers. I also use a macro inside of Audacity but that is another matter. Perhaps it woujld be possible for you to program some to do what i have described above?

[ChrisGreaves]

Chris, you can do what you want with your own recordings, but having all the gaps between sentences exactly uniform is not how one normally speaks and will also presumably remove all the breaths in these "gaps", which will therefore not sound natural. Also if your plan is to add silence, as opposed to room "noise" the resulting recordings will then sound like you are switching the audio on and off between sentences.

Hi Jo, and thanks for the feedback. I agree with you that gaps need to be human in nature. There is nothing to prevent me writing a macro to generate randomized gaps, and nor do I have to process every gap. For example, I often leave a 5+ second gap while recording while I mentally practice pronunciation of a German phrase before opening my mouth to speak. A macro to truncate every silence to no more than two seconds would be a time-saver.

That said, the purpose of the example use of macros in the original post in the original topic was to provide a mini-forum where a few macro-writers could congregate to share and publish a catalogue of useful macros for every member to use, as they saw fit.

A general-purpose thread with 90 pages of posts (now at 91 pages) is perhaps not the ideal place to hunt for a macro.

I have set myself the task of trawling the phpBB site scraping up, documenting, and testing every Audacity macro. That catalogue needs to be published somewhere in an easy and accessible manner. This is no small task as you will find if you try to identify every post that contains the code for an Audacity macro using phpBB's search facility. It is the code we seek, not a general discussion about macros. And I would rather not miss a single chunk of code.

A well-defined arena for macros ought to be valuable for members of LibriVox

Cheers
Chris

[lurcherlover]

I would not want to use a macro because I judge every gap between words in relation to the text. So one gap may be 1 second, another 0.5 sec and another 3 seconds. I also try and make the speed of a sentence vary with the context, and even have very short gaps such as 0.25 second, followed by 3.25 secs. Everything depends on the text, and no macro can ever edit artistically in the way a proper editor can.

[ChrisGreaves]

Editing is a huge part of the process, and I personally don't see how such macros would help.
My two-cents

Thank you Larry. I have added your two cents worth to my 2¢ jar. There is enough there to buy a coffee for every active member of LibriVox, although they will each have to make their own way to Bonavista

But please see my reply to Jo about "gaps of silence".

A guiding principle of my life is "If it is boring and repetitive - write a macro", and after only two weeks on the job(grin) I have found myself doing much Audacity work that is Boring and Repetitive". Too, I spend time reading topics to learn from the experience of long-time members and see discussions about the time taken to edit versus the time to record. It seems to me that if one member (could be me) spent ten minutes crafting and testing a macro in Audacity, then that time will be recouped many times over by every Audacity-user who makes use of that macro in the years to come.

Most of us make heavy uses of macros in the phpBB system without knowing it. Every time we click on "New Posts", "Your Posts" or "Active Topics" in the QuickLinks menu, we are using a macro-command that can be generated by using Advanced Search. The macro in QuickLinks means that you do not have to load up the Advanced Pane and enter keywords and choose layout options.
You can test this macro-capability by choosing "Your Posts" from the QuickLinks menu, and then in the Search These Topics box, type in a search term, such as "macro". Tap <Enter> and then look at the generated search URL. You could craft that URL by hand, but the QuickLinks macro saves you a great deal of typing, typing errors, and hence - time.

Cheers
Chris

[ChrisGreaves]

I would not want to use a macro because I judge every gap between words in relation to the text. So one gap may be 1 second, another 0.5 sec and another 3 seconds. I also try and make the speed of a sentence vary with the context, and even have very short gaps such as 0.25 second, followed by 3.25 secs. Everything depends on the text, and no macro can ever edit artistically in the way a proper editor can.

Thank you lurcherlover, Please see my reply to Jo.
Chris

[TriciaG]

I've split this back off into its own thread. While it's talking about Audacity, it's not a quick "I have an Audacity problem" question that can be answered quickly in a thread like that.

[ChrisGreaves]

Perhaps it would be possible for you to program some to do what i have described above?

For sure, Phil. How versatile are Audacity macros? Well, if I can generate three different tones at, say, 0cps, 440cps and 880cps and call them Null, One and Zero (easy enough to do) and if I can also test a track for those tones (that is, move a read-head and determine what tone is underneath the read head), then that is a Turing Machine Interpreter, (the audio track is our "paper tape") and THAT means that I can build Turing Machines in Audacity! How delightfully audacious.
Please give me a day or two to think about how this scheme will work (This thread, NOT the Turing Machines!) and then I can be the first consultant in this thread and you can be my first client.
Cheers, and Thank you, Chris

[annise]

Personal opinion
If you need to depend on all these things why bother reading at all - just use text to voice software. It would be a lot less work
I prefer reading that sound like someone is reading me a story -
I like hearing they are breathing not dead,
I like the slight slowdown when they come across a difficult word.
I like variations between phrases and sentences etc depending on the story they are telling me,
I like the different accents,

And that is why I'm here.
Editing is like the finishing you apply to new woodwork and to dressmaking - it's not "productive" but it does make a big difference to the finished product

Anne

[knotyouraveragejo]

Hi Chris. I'm going to move this thread over to Suggestions, Comments, News & Discussion which is probably a better spot to continue this discussion going forward.

[InTheDesert]

Sounds like you want the 'Truncate Silence' effect in Audacity.

[ChrisGreaves]

If you need to depend on all these things why bother reading at all - just use text to voice software. It would be a lot less work

Thank you Anne. I love Reading, well what I have been able to do so far. No doubt about it. Too, over the years, I have had experience with text-to-voice software, at both ends, sending and receiving , and it is not nice. It is getting better year by year, but still not nice.
My example of "gaps" was picked because I thought that people could all appreciate the term "gaps".

I have been trying to read through many topics in the LibriVox forums, and a common comment from PLs seems to be the business of the 0.5 to 1.0 second silence at the head of a section, and the five-second silence at the end. This is an ideal job for a macro, a macro that would fall into the "cleanup" category. Such a macro is not related to reading, breathing, mouth-clicks or any of those delightful characteristics of human readers, as much as to the mechanical technical requirements of, I presume, the audio-editors who assemble the final product for the LibriVox catalogue.

In another post I suggested that we all use "phpBB macros" whenever we choose "New Posts", "Your Posts" or "Active Topics" from the QuickLinks menu.

Phil Chenevert has wisely pointed out that short-cut key combinations are, in effect, macro commands. For many of us, Ctrl+C to copy and Ctrl+V to paste were our first macro-commands in Windows applications.

Too, I have used the Checker program many times which is a form of Macro, in that it saves us from manually loading a track into an editor such as Audacity and then visually locating the track characteristics, or writing or using a meta-data editor to read the same thing.

It is a truism, that whenever we find ourselves doing Boring and Repetitive tasks, we should see if there isn't a way to assign that task to a computer, thereby giving us more time to be creative humans.

Cheers
Chris

[ChrisGreaves]

Sounds like you want the 'Truncate Silence' effect in Audacity.

Yes, something like that as the basic command for the (poor) example I gave.
That said, I do not want to issue multiple Truncate Silence commands when I am doing raw cleanup of a track.
Even if a single Truncate Silence command can clean up all silences on a track, I have other commands to apply to the track, (I am getting out of my depth here but) Normalization, Click/Pop/Hiss/Notch and similar problems might be either identified or eliminated (your choice) right across a track.
Such track-wide commands could be collected into a macro or batch command and issued as a group.
We already do that with the Checker program which operates on a track and identifies common problems under a single command.

Cheers
Chris