I modified the Silence Finder plugin that comes with Audacity, and turned it into a Sound Finder plugin. The original plugin let you specify the minimum time period and volume level needed to count as a silence, and then inserted a label at some point during the silence. This new Sound Finder plugin creates a label that stretches the length of each sound segment.

I’ve now used this to help me add text transcriptions to about 80 audio files in 4 languages (Beembe, Bekwel, Mbochi, and Teke). The default parameters have worked pretty well for me, but you may need to adjust them depending on your recording.

This is the Sound Finder dialog:

SoundFinderDialog

This is an example of the resulting labels. You can replace the labels with your own text. In my case, I will replace the numbers with a text transcription.

SoundFinderExample

Finally, here’s the plugin file that you can download. Put it in the Plug-Ins folder inside your Audacity folder. After restarting Audacity, you should be able to access the plugin from the Analyze menu.

soundfinder.ny