[audacity4blind] Tasks I'd like to accomplish
- From: "Nolan Darilek" <nolan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <audacity4blind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2007 18:40:52 +0100
Hello. Sent a message about this to the list this morning, but a look at the
archives isn't showing it. Maybe with the increased activity here, I can find
some answers.
I'd like to use Audacity to (finally) get my podcast off the ground. There are
some tasks which I don't think can be accomplished accessibly, though, and I've
tried to learn how to write plugins, but lisp-like languages have always been
difficult for me to wrap my brain around for some reason. I'd like to begin my
podcast with bed music that fades out to, say, 40% of its original amplitude,
at which point I introduce the episode, increase to full volume then fade out
completely. I can fade to silence, but AFAIK the envelope tool isn't accessible
and that's what I'd need.
What, exactly, does the envelope tool allow? Is it just for adjusting volumes
of the waveform? I wonder if it might be worth submitting accessibility
suggestions to the Audacity developers--perhaps keyboard shortcuts for
increasing/decreasing the volume at point of selection, but I'm not familiar
with the tool and don't know if my view of it is greatly simplified.
In the absence of this, how difficult would it be to write a plugin to fade
in/out to the specified percentage of original amplitude? It would behave
exactly as the standard "fade out/in" effects, but would perhaps have a
percentage slider and the end result would be audio at that percent of its
original amplitude ("original amplitude" defined as its volume independent of
any fades.)
I also want to timeshift bumper music/promos. In my tests I've been doing this
by inserting silence, but the process is rather tedius. I first need to find
the time in my voice track where I'd like to insert the bumper. Memorizing that
time, I then have to import the desired audio into a new track, arrow to it,
select a portion then insert silence until it has reached the specified length.
Is there any way to access the timeshift tool? If not, is that functionality
available via plugin such that, say, a "Timeshift track to current" plugin
could present a list of tracks then shift the selected track to the position of
the play/record head? I've also not checked whether inserting silence makes my
project files' sizes explode or whether the format is smart enough to not
record the silence as bytes, though even so, it would be nice knowing that a
given bumper track is whatever its actual length is without seeing the length
of the silence reported in that time as well.
One final question. Is there any way of determining the volume of audio on a
specified track at a specified point in time? Perhaps some area of the screen
that displays this information as a track plays? Thinking that I might like to
try writing JAWS/NVDA scripts to make Audacity more friendly in some respects
(if others haven't already, that is) and it'd be cool to know how close my
recordings come to clipping.
Thanks a bunch! Hoping this list becomes more active. I really like Audacity's
multitrack nature and have played with other programs for audio in the past
months, but keep coming back to Audacity, wishing there were some way to get
these features.
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