Audacity: Exporting time track to csv

Question

I'm looking for a program that can export a time track to a csv file, preferably in Windows. Do you know one?

I've already tried a bunch of free software, without success.

This may be a better question / bug to address directly at Audacity. As far as I can tell, the export feature doesn't actually work for time tracks. It just exports a wav or aiff file, which isn't useful. My guess is that the feature is either not implemented or the current behavior is a regression.

Fred42vid · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-03 11:21:51Z

The time track coordinates are written into the audacity project file (.aup), which is effectively an XML file.

With this .aup file you have two possibilities:

If you're a programmer, you can write a simple XML to CSV converter, that only extracts the XML tags you need.
Some spreadsheet programs can read XML files, too. The following works for MS Excel 2010 Starter, but not with LibreOffice Calc 3.6: Open an empty table and drag your .aup file into it. In the resulting table there are 2 columns /timetrack/envelope/controlpoint/@t and /timetrack/envelope/controlpoint/@val that have your requested data. Just delete all the other columns and save this two-column-table as a .csv file.

Perhaps other users know an XML to CSV converter that does these steps automatically.

My poorly phrased question wasn't specifically about Audacity, but rather about programs that have a tracks with a similar function to Audacity's Time Tracks. That said, option 1 is the best way to extract the Time Track's data.

1 Answer