Time Shift Tool in Audacity

Yesterday, a student was using Audacity to record himself reading some sentences in Spanish. He had created multiple tracks to record different sentences so that he didn’t have to read the entire paragraph at once. When he had finished, he realized that he had accidently skipped a sentence and was wondering if there was any way he could insert a new audio clip recording the forgotten sentence between his existing ones. Being more familiar with GarageBand, this was a learning experience for both of us. We discovered that an easy way to resolve this is to simply add a new track (Tracks > Add new > Audio Track), record, and then move the clip to where you’d like it to play from using the time shift tool. When you open Audacity, the program defaults your mouse to the selection tool, which doesn’t allow you to shift tracks around. You have to select the time shift tool first before you can rearrange the tracks. Once we figured this out, it was a quick and easy solution for this student’s problem!