How to split a recording into tracks in Audacity
To split one long recording into separate tracks in Audacity, put a label over each song and name it with the song’s title. Then choose File ▸ Export audio… and set Type to Labeled regions as separate audio files. Audacity 4.0.1 writes one file per label in a single export. When the songs have silent gaps between them, Analyze ▸ Label sounds can place the labels for you, and you only check and rename them.
This guide picks up where a recording ends and a folder of songs should begin. It covers finding the song boundaries by eye or with Label sounds, placing and naming labels, and the export itself. Then come the split tool for the cases labels do not fit, file names, tags and formats, and the mistakes that leave a track starting a beat late.
Tested on Audacity 4.0.1 on macOS Sequoia; the screenshots are from that build, except the Label sounds dialog, shot on Windows 11. Shortcuts are written for Windows; macOS uses Cmd where Windows uses Ctrl. Audacity 4.0.0 has no multi-file export, so update to 4.0.1 or later before you start.
Split, clean and export with Audacity
What you need
- One recording with several songs in it. A vinyl side, a cassette, a live set or a long podcast session you want in segments. Bring it in with File ▸ Import (Ctrl+Shift+I) or record it straight into the project.
- Audacity 4.0.1 or later. It is free for Windows, macOS and Linux, and MuseHub keeps it updated for you.
- The track titles. Take them from the sleeve, the setlist or your show notes. Typing them as you label saves a rename pass afterwards.
Step 1: Find the song boundaries
Zoom out until the whole recording fits the window with View ▸ Zoom ▸ Zoom to fit project. The gaps between songs show as flat stretches in the waveform, and on a side with clean gaps you can count the songs at a glance.
Zoom in on each gap before you trust it (Ctrl+scroll zooms around the pointer). A gap that looks clean from a distance may hold a fade-out tail or a spoken count-in, so play the second before it and listen for where the music stops.
Let Label sounds find the gaps. Select the whole recording (Ctrl+A) and open Analyze ▸ Label sounds. It scans for passages louder than a threshold, treats anything quieter that lasts long enough as a gap, and places a label around each sound it finds. Four settings matter.
- Threshold level (dB) (default −30, measured as Peak level) sets how loud a passage must be to count as music. Vinyl surface noise sits below it on most rips; a noisy tape may need it raised.
- Minimum silence duration (default 1 second) sets how long a quiet stretch must last to count as a gap. Raise it for classical or live material with pauses inside a piece.
- Label type should stay at Region around sounds, the default. A region label covers a song from its start to its end, which is what the export in Step 4 works from.
- Label text (default
Sound ##1) turns the hashes into a running number, so the labels arrive as Sound 01, Sound 02 and so on, ready to rename.
On the eight-song side in the screenshots, the defaults placed one region per song, Sound 01 to Sound 08, and left the gaps unlabeled. Still check every region, because Label sounds cannot tell a long rest from the end of a song.
If Label sounds answers “Effect not found” on a Mac, as it did on one of our test machines, the fix is in the FAQ below.
Step 2: Put a label over each song
The export writes one file per label, and a region label that spans a song, from the first note to the end of the fade, gives a file with exactly that song.
- Labels from Label sounds. The regions are already there. Check each one’s edges and drag an edge where it cuts into a fade or clips a count-in.
- Labels by hand. Drag across a song in the waveform to select it, then press Ctrl+B or choose Edit ▸ Label ▸ Add label. If there is no label track yet, Audacity adds one named Labels 1 under the audio, and the new label opens for typing, so type the title straight away.
- One label per song. Repeat for each song. All the labels sit on one label track, a bar per song.
With nothing selected, Ctrl+B makes a point label instead, a single marker at the cursor. The export runs a point label’s file on to the next label, or to the end of the recording, so a marker at each song’s start works too, but each file then keeps the gap after its song. Regions leave out whatever lies between them, such as the run-in groove or the silence after the last song, so nothing needs trimming afterwards.
Zoom in until you can see the first hit of the song before you set an edge; an edge placed from a zoomed-out view can land half a second off. Drag a wrong edge into place rather than deleting the label and starting again.
Step 3: Name the labels with the track titles
Select a label and press F2, or choose Edit ▸ Label ▸ Rename label. Type the title exactly as you want it on disk, because the export names each file after its label (Step 4).
To review every label in one place, open Edit ▸ Label ▸ Manage labels. It lists all the labels in the project, so a typo is fixed without hunting along the timeline.
Put a two-digit number in front of each title (01 Blue in Green) so the files sort in album order in any player. Leave slashes and colons out of the titles, because Windows and macOS do not accept them in file names.
Step 4: Export one file per song
Audacity 4.0.1 exports the whole side in one pass.
- Open the export. Choose File ▸ Export audio… (Ctrl+Shift+E). If Audacity first asks where to save, click Export to computer.
- Set the type. Open the Type menu and choose Labeled regions as separate audio files.
- Check the names. File name preview shows
LabelName.wav: each file takes its label’s text as its name. File name prefix adds text in front of every name, and Number files in label order adds a two-digit number and a full stop (01.LabelName.wav). With numbered titles, leave the prefix empty and the box unticked, as they are by default. - Leave the run-in out. Include audio before first label is off by default, so nothing before the first song gets a file of its own.
- Pick the folder and format. Type the path of an empty folder into Folder or click Browse to pick one, then choose WAV or FLAC in Format for the copy you keep. For a record, set Channels to Stereo.
- Run it. Click Export. Audacity writes one file per region into the folder, each stopping at its label’s edges.
With numbered titles, the folder lists the songs in album order, ready to copy to a phone or a music library.
On Audacity 3 the label steps are the same, and the Export Audio dialog splits files based on labels.
The Type menu in the 4.0.1 Export audio dialog has five options, and each writes something different.
| Type | What it writes | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Full project audio | One file with every track mixed | A finished mix or episode |
| Selected audio | One file of the current selection | One song out of a side |
| Audio in loop region | One file of the loop region | The passage you have been looping |
| Tracks as separate audio files | One file per track | Parts already on their own tracks, such as host, guest and music bed |
| Labeled regions as separate audio files | One file per labeled region | An album side, a live set, a session in segments |
When the split tool fits better
Labels leave the audio in one piece, so a boundary can move at any time before you export. The split tool cuts the clip itself, which fits when you want to edit the pieces or the parts already sit on separate tracks.
- Cut at a point. Press S or click Split tool on the toolbar, then click the clip where a song starts. Ctrl+I does the same at the cursor, and with a range selected it cuts at both edges.
- Cut at every silence. Edit ▸ Clip ▸ Split clips at silences (Ctrl+Alt+J) cuts a selection at each gap in one move. Ctrl+Z undoes a wrong cut, and Edit ▸ Clip ▸ Join selected clips (Ctrl+J) puts two clips back together.
- Export the pieces. Clips on one track do not become separate files on their own. Select a clip and export it with Type set to Selected audio, or, when each part has a track of its own, choose Tracks as separate audio files.
For an album, labels are quicker, because one export writes every song. Trimming and cutting audio in Audacity covers the split tool for editing inside a track.
Joining many files into one
The reverse job, such as a dozen clips that should become one recording, uses the same tools in the other order.
- Import them all. Choose File ▸ Import and select every file at once. Each one lands on a new track.
- Line them up end to end. Drag each clip by its header bar onto the first track, so it starts where the previous one ends. Zoom in on each join to leave neither a gap nor an overlap.
- Export once. Choose File ▸ Export audio… with Type set to Full project audio, which mixes everything into one file.
For hundreds of clips, or a fixed pause between each one, the command-line tool FFmpeg is faster than lining clips up by hand. Its concat function joins a list of files, and a short file of silence placed between them adds the pause.
File names, tags and formats
A music player sorts by file name or by tags, so a digitized record needs both right.
- File names. Number them and keep the artist and album out of the name; the folder and the tags carry those.
- Tags. Edit ▸ Metadata editor lists Track title, Artist name, Album title, Track number, Year and Comments; Add tag puts in others, such as Genre. Fill in the album-wide fields once before you export. Each file then takes its track title from its label and its track number from its place in the order, and the other tags carry over. Finder and some players do not show every tag in a WAV file; a dedicated tag editor such as kid3 can check them file by file.
- Format. Export once in a lossless format, WAV or FLAC, as the copy you keep. For a phone or a car, run the export again with MP3 Files as the format; its default quality is Standard, 170–210 kbps. Recording a turntable into Audacity has a format table.
Common mistakes
- A gapless album. Live records and DJ mixes run one track into the next, so Label sounds finds nothing. Set the edges by ear on the downbeat of each new song and accept that the split falls inside a sustained note; that is how the record was made.
- Songs that start a beat late. The edge was set from a zoomed-out view. Zoom in until the first hit is visible and drag the edge onto it.
- Mono files from a stereo record. The recording was captured on one channel, or Channels was set to Mono in the export. Check that the track shows two channels and that Channels says Stereo.
- Ten files when you wanted one. The export dialog reopens with the last settings you used. Set Type back to Full project audio or Selected audio before a single-file export.
- A song missing from the folder. It has no label of its own: with regions it ends up in no file, and after a point label it runs on into the previous song’s file. Check on the label track that every song has a label.
- Files far bigger than expected. Check the Format. WAV is uncompressed, about 10 MB per minute at CD quality, while an MP3 is a fraction of that. Keep the WAV or FLAC set as the archive and export MP3 copies for sharing.
Pro tips
- Leave the pickup. When a song starts with a breath or a count-in you want to keep, set the start edge a fraction before the first sound.
- Save the project before exporting. Saving keeps the labels and the untouched recording; exporting writes copies. If a file comes out wrong, fix the label and export again.
- Clean up before you split. Click removal and noise reduction on one long recording run once; on twelve files they run twelve times. Noise reduction in Audacity covers the order.
Example settings
Two starting points for Label sounds, adjusted from its defaults. Look at the labels it placed, undo, and adjust if a song came out in two pieces.
| Setting | A vinyl side | A podcast session with segments |
|---|---|---|
| Threshold level | −30 dB, Peak level (the default); lower it if quiet intros are missed | −30 dB, RMS level, so a cough in a pause does not count as a segment |
| Minimum silence duration | 2 seconds; real gaps between songs are longer than any rest inside one | 3 seconds or more, longer than any pause in speech |
| Minimum label interval | 1 second (the default) | 30 seconds, so nothing shorter than a segment gets its own label |
| Label type | Region around sounds | Region around sounds |
| Maximum leading silence | 0.5 seconds, to keep a soft start inside the track | 0 seconds |
| Label text | Track ##1, then rename with the titles | Segment ##1 |
Continuing from the turntable guide
If you came here from recording a turntable into Audacity, your side is recorded and cleaned, and the steps above turn it into files. With both sides in one project, label them in the same pass and one export writes the whole album. For a cassette, the Audacity team’s own walkthrough is the manual’s sample workflow for tape digitization.
A podcast session with three interviews is the same job. Label the segments, export them in one go, and continue with how to edit a podcast in Audacity.
Audio in the screenshots: the first 60 seconds of eight tracks from Pixabay, Swing Jazz Cocktail Bar, Romantic Eighties Jazz, Bossa Nova Cafe Morning Breeze, Jazz Midnight Club, Jazz Guitar, Smooth Jazz, Jazz Lounge Sunny Cafe and Soul, used under the Pixabay Content License.
FAQ
Next steps
Trimming and cutting audio in Audacity covers the clip handles and the split tool for editing inside a track. Editing a podcast in Audacity runs the whole chain from a raw session to a published episode. Audacity 4 is on the Audacity page on MuseHub, next to the plugins that clean a recording before you split it. Get them in one place — download MuseHub free.
