Audacity Tutorial: Adding 1 sec of Silence at the beginning of a bunch of mp3's at once

[𝕸𝖆𝖙𝖙6𝖘𝖎𝖈6]

This is a super super simple tutorial for anyone like myself starting that loooong journey of adding custom theme music to 500+ edits.

This is for anyone using the easy theme mod in the mod suite.

Let's say you've gone through the process of obtaining and installing the songs you want on the wrestlers you want. You're ready to start enjoying matches with custom themes. You begin a match only to find that the first second or two of the song is cut off when the entrance starts, turning that "IF YA SMELL" into "-A SMELL".

Kinda ruins the moment don't it? So you decide to open up audacity and add 1 second of silence to the beginning of the problem song, which inadvertently postpones the start of the song so that it plays correctly in-game. Easy peasy. Open up the problem mp3, Click generate silence. Type in 1 second. Done. Export the mp3.

But then it slowly dawns on you... You have to do this around 500 times...

CRAP MAN You'll be here all day!

... Or will you?

For those of you who don't know, if you want to add 1 sec of silence at the beginning of say, 100 mp3's at once, automated, all you have to do is:

Open Audacity. Drag and drop all the mp3's you plan to edit. Wait for them to finish importing. Don't move the cursor in any of the tracks, leave it at the beginning, this is important.

Now, Go to Edit -> Select -> In All Tracks

Now click Generate -> Silence. Type in 1 second and hit ok - BAM, 1 sec of silence added to all files loaded. Now all you gotta do is go to file -> export multiple, select mp3 format and hit export.

You can also check the box to overwrite the original files if you want. Also, if you don't want to have to hit ok for each file when it asks about the metadata, you can turn this feature off before exporting by going to edit -> preferences -> Import/Export, and uncheck the box that says "Show Metadata Editor prior to export step".

Hope this wall of text helps someone.

[MysticKitten]

Very nice. I've not gotten around to any custom music or Trons yet but this will help on the music front. Audacity is a great free program.

[CoopThePanda]

Very useful tip! Could have used it 18 months ago! :D

[World Peace Pro]

GREAT POST.

[SirBrak]

Good stuff! A question related to this topic: how do you normalize a bunch of songs at once in Audacity?

[𝕸𝖆𝖙𝖙6𝖘𝖎𝖈6]

Originally posted by SirBrak:

Good stuff! A question related to this topic: how do you normalize a bunch of songs at once in Audacity?

You basically follow the same steps as you did when adding silence to multiple files, IE:

Drag/drop/import files into audacity,

Go to Edit -> Select -> In All Tracks

Now this time, instead of going to Generate -> Silence, instead go to Effect -> Normalize. Set whatever amplitude/dB you want and hit ok.

Done. *Chef's kiss*

[SirBrak]

Awesome. Thank you.