STEP THREE: Aligning Audio Clips
Now we are going to move each of these files into order. The order of clips for this tutorial is:
* Arnold Schwarzenegger (Last Action Hero): police.wav
* Humphrey Bogart (Treasure of the Sierra Madre): badges.wav
* Humphrey Bogart (unknown): thats_it.wav
* Robert DeNiro (This Boy's Life): piehole.wav
* Sound FX page 2: gunshots2.wav
* Humphrey Bogart (Petrified Forest): wrong.wav
* Clint Eastwood: good_bad_ugly.wav (the music will run the entire soundscape)
Select the second audio clip by holding down the mouse button and scrolling over the clip.
"Edit" and then "Cut."
Next position your clip by clicking your cursor where you want the clip to be on the audio track. In this case, at least at first,we want all the clips to start just as the next one ends.
Then select "Project" and "Align tracks..." and "Align with cursor"
Select "Edit" and "Paste." To get a closer look you may want to use the magnifying glass icons to zoom in (or out).
Continue this process this way until your screen looks something like this with each audio clip in order (do not move the music since it will play during the entire soundscape and don't worry about it not being long enough since we will fix this soon).
Lets say we change our mind and we want to start with the clip wrong.wav instead of police.wav. Although normally you move clips within their own individual tracks, you can also Cut a track from where it is and click inside another audio track and Paste it into another track.
In addition to using the magnifying lens to get a better view, you also can collapse your view of audio tracks into looking smaller (or larger for that matter) by clicking and holding the bottom of the track and moving your mouse up or down to compress the look or expand it.
Of course all the rest of the audio still must be moved further down the timeline. Since I cut the audio completely from a track I chose to click the X in the left corner since it was no longer needed. Normally, adding audio into another track like this is not suggested since it makes it harder to edit them since they no longer are separated. However, it is useful to know that if you want to you can do this.
If you want to move a portion of an audio clip this tutorial is helpful: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/manual-1.2/tutorial_ed_beginner4.html