How do I extract tunes?
I tapped off the mixer at a recent gig to make an eight-track recording of the event. Now I’d like to create seperate file copies of each tune for post-mixing.
Is there a way inside N-track of doing this? TIA
I’m assuming you have a full length recording of each channel and you aren’t asking if it’s possible to filter out one instrument from a mixdown track type of thing.
You could download Audacity (great wave editor better than what nTrack can do). Save a backup copy of each full length track. Load each into Audacity, cut away what you don’t need. Reposition each wave to the beginning of the timeline and save each track as whatever. That kinda thing. nTrack can do this too but Audacity is quick and really easy to work with. It’s free too. Absolutely the best wave editor on the planet IMHO.
You can also do it in n-Track by using the markers.
1. Zoom into the beginning of the track
2. On the timeline, right click and choose Add a marker. You then can drag it to the left or right to get the marker exactly where you want it. A suggestion, though, is to leave a bit of “breathing room” between the beginning of the track and the actual music material.
3. Zoom in to the end of the track and add a marker as well.
4. Repeat for each track
5. Zoom out to be able to see a few or all of the tracks
6. Right click between markers (of track 1, for example) and choose Select between markers"
7. Go to the mixdown screen, choose more. n-Track should have set the from and to times for you. Name the file, choose which track you want to extract (bottom right), etc.
8. Repeat 6 and 7 for each track.
Paul
vanclan, that produces a mixdown of each song, rather than a song file with 8 tracks for each song (which is what I think he wants). But it’s nice to know, good post.
I don’t think there’s a non-tedious way to split up songs or sets in n-Track. For live work, I recommend recording in sets, stopping at sensible points and starting a new song file, and mixing set-at-a-time. After mixing and creating set-long mixes, do the chopping on the stereo 32-bit file in the mastering phase.
I think that’s a happy medium between the hassle of splitting up to a song file per song, and using one song file for the whole gig.
Regardless, you can take a similar approach, but when mixing down, either do the whole night and chop that, or else use the nifty method that Paul (vanlclan) posted above and mixdown one song at a time.
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| vanclan, that produces a mixdown of each song, rather than a song file with 8 tracks for each song |
If when you mix down, you choose the tracks individually (bottom right corner of the mixdown screen), you can actually export each of the 8 tracks - a bit tedious, as you mention, but is possible.
This would be a nice “summer present” from Flavio, if it could be done in a simpler method. I need to change a few recordings (of about 15-20 tracks per song) from 24 bit to 16 bit, so that one of the band members can take it home and fiddle with the mix using his computer with a 16 bit card (he purchased a 16 bit copy of n-Track). With the way it is now, it is going to be a task - tedium plus.
Paul
Paul, no need to convert the tracks to 24 bits. 16-bit n-Track will handle 24-bit files just fine. It won’t record or play back to a 24-bit soundcard, is all.
I do think a “Split Song” feature might be nifty. Do your initial level setting & FX for each of the night’s tracks, and then split the whole session into as many songs as you want (probably one at a time, slicing off the first or last song and saving to a new song file). The split point could be set by the time cursor, or by the beginning of the selection. All settings would be copied to the new song. Maybe I’ll suggest this on the Wiki.
Anyone have a better idea on how such a feature should work?
It would also be nice to have the option to “split at all marks”, rather than the default of splitting at the selection start or time cursor.
Thanks for that clarification. I’ll definitely have to check that out. And your idea of a “split song” feature is a great idea.
An alternate work-flow for the existing version of the program is to take the original .sng with the .wav including all the songs and do a rough mix to get the basic settings together. It can be helpful to insert markers at the beginning and end of each song in this “master” .sng as well. Use the “Move or Copy Song” function under the file menu to create a back-up copy in case you blow something (This is good practice regardless).
Then you can do one “Save As” for each indivudual song.
At this point you will have multiple copies of the multi-song “master” .sng file, each titled for an individual song.
You then open each one individually and trim to the markers for that individual song, moving all the tracks together to the begining of the timeline. I don’t have the program in front of me so I won’t try to describe the short-cuts for trimming and moving but at this point you should have individual multi-track .sng files which share a common set of .wav files. You can do all the non-destructive editing you want without affecting the other tunes.
The downside of this is that mistakenly doing a destructive operation like normalization will affect the underlying files although the operation should be confined to the section pertaining to the current song only. Operations such as deleting or moving tracks could result in problems with other songs and need to be considered carefully. You can always do the individual track mixdown to create dedicated .wav files (as vanclan suggested) to create totally independent .wav files. This improves portability but is not necessary for working with the song.
This method lets you avoid repeating things that are done on all the songs (adding the same effects to each, naming the channels, etc.) since that is done in the “master” song and copied to each instance. “Save as” is a quick operation, (as is trimming across all of the tracks in a .sng) so this can go pretty quickly. At some point you may want to create dedicated .wav files for each song for back-up flexibility but as I said above, it is not necessary if you want to save time.
Jim
Good point, Jim. Also, if you use the “copy” option and use a different folder for each song, you get duplicates of the wave files, avoiding the sharing problems you mentioned (but using lots more disk space until you trim the files).