Splitting a continuous recording into individual tracks using Audacity

When you inherit a box of cassette mixtapes from a relative in Adelaide or pick up a bundle of second-hand LPs from a trash-and-treasure market in Brisbane, the contents often arrive as one unbroken journey rather than neatly separated songs. The challenge is identical whether the source is a worn Maxell cassette from the 1980s or a reissue of a Slim Dusty LP you found at a Sunday stall in Fremantle. Audacity, the free audio editor, captures that stream cleanly and gives you the tools to carve it back into individual tracks.

The software runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, which matters if your household mixes an old HP tower in the study with a MacBook used for work. Splitting a single long recording into separate files is a routine task once you understand the concept of labels and silence detection. Many users in regional Victoria and Queensland find themselves digitising tapes during long winter evenings, when finally there is time to work through the collection.

Before you begin, make sure the source itself is in reasonable condition. Dust, mould and static build up on vinyl stored in a suburban garage through humid summers, while cassette shells can warp if left on a windowsill in Perth. A few minutes of preparation saves hours of editing later, and the rest of this walkthrough assumes the incoming signal is already as clean as possible.

Preparing Audacity for long sessions

Open Audacity and check the project rate at the bottom-left of the window. Set it to 44100 Hz for CD-bound audio, which matches the Red Book standard used by every commercial CD pressed at a plant in Sydney or Melbourne. For archival masters you can choose 48000 Hz, but 44100 keeps the maths simple when you eventually burn a disc.

Allocate enough free space on your hard drive before recording. A single 90-minute cassette captured as 16-bit stereo WAV creates a file of around 1.5 GB, and a full LP side is closer to 700 MB. Many Australians store working files on a portable SSD that lives in the desk drawer, which keeps the main laptop drive uncluttered. Close other applications while recording, especially browsers with many tabs, because dropouts in the captured waveform are a pain to repair later.

Adjust the input level so peaks sit around -6 dB on the meter. Loud passages from a Maxell cassette often surprise you, so leave a few decibels of headroom. If you are recording from a turntable through a USB preamp, set the gain on the preamp itself rather than only in software, which gives you cleaner results before any digital cleanup runs.

Capturing the source from deck or turntable

The cabling step catches out many first-timers, particularly those who assume any 3.5 mm lead will do. Cassette decks use RCA outputs at line level, while turntables need either a phono stage or a preamp with RIAA equalisation built in. A clear walkthrough of connecting a tape deck saves the trial-and-error that otherwise eats into a Saturday afternoon.

Vinyl demands a slightly different routine. Wiping each side with a carbon-fibre brush and a proper cleaning fluid removes the static that builds up in dry inland climates, from Ballarat in winter to the air-conditioned living rooms of Darwin. A thorough rinse of the record before you drop the needle pays for itself many times over, and a focused guide on cleaning vinyl before digitising covers the small details that beginners tend to skip.

Press record in Audacity once the deck or turntable is running, then let the entire side play through without interruption. Splitting is far easier when you have one continuous waveform to scan than when you chop the source into multiple smaller files. Sit nearby and watch the level meter rather than walking away, because a loose cable can introduce silence right at the start of side two.

Spotting natural pauses between songs

Once the recording is complete, zoom in on the waveform and look for the gaps where the music stops. A genuine track break usually lasts between 1.5 and 3 seconds of near-silence, with the noise floor showing the hiss of the cassette or the rumble of the stylus rather than absolute digital silence. Track joins that happen mid-song, common on live albums from the Countdown era, need a different approach later.

If the album was pressed in Australia by a local label such as Festival Records or Mushroom, the gaps between tracks tend to be generous because engineers expected listeners to drop the needle carefully. Imports from overseas can be tighter, especially 1980s digital recordings mastered in the United States, where fades often bleed into the next track. Adjust your expectations for the era and the country of pressing.

Useful markers for a clean split point include:

• Background hiss dropping noticeably for more than two seconds
• A clear gap with no audible vocal or instrument content
• A waveform that flattens to a thin line on screen
• The visual cue of two distinct shapes with empty space between them

Run through the recording once with headphones, marking candidate points by clicking in the waveform. There is no harm in over-marking at this stage, because you can always merge segments later if a split turns out to be in the wrong place.

Marking and labelling track boundaries

Convert your candidate points into real labels using Audacity's labelling feature. Press Ctrl+B (or Cmd+B on macOS) at each chosen position to drop a label point, then type the song title into the label box as you go. Typing while listening slows the process down, so many people add rough labels first and fill in the correct names once the whole side is marked.

A handy trick is to enable the Label Track view, which shows every boundary as a vertical line on the timeline. You can drag the edges to fine-tune the placement, nudging a label a few milliseconds earlier or later if the gap sits awkwardly across a reverb tail. For long recordings captured over a wet weekend in Hobart, this visual layout makes it far easier to scan the whole session at a glance.

If the album came with printed liner notes, transcribe the track listing now while you still remember which track is which. Australian reissues of international albums occasionally shuffle the running order, so trust the sleeve in your hand rather than an online database if the two disagree. Save the Audacity project file at this point so the labels stay attached to the audio for future edits.

Exporting each track separately

Use File, then Export Multiple, to turn a labelled session into a folder of separate files. Audacity will prompt you for a name pattern and a destination folder, and it will create one file per label automatically. The naming convention should include the disc or side number, which keeps archives tidy when you eventually digitise a whole shelf of recordings from a Brisbane estate sale.

Settings worth choosing for a CD-bound output include:

• WAV (Microsoft) 16-bit PCM as the master format
• 44100 Hz sample rate to match the Red Book standard
• Track numbers embedded in the file name for easy sorting
• A separate folder per album side to avoid mix-ups

Keep the WAV masters in cold storage on an external drive as the archival copy. Convert smaller MP3 or FLAC versions for everyday listening, but never throw away the WAVs. Blank CD-Rs are still cheap at JB Hi-Fi and Officeworks, so burning a physical copy for the glovebox of the family station wagon remains a sensible backup.

Burning the final tracks to CD

Audacity does not burn CDs itself, so hand the exported WAV folder over to a dedicated burning program such as ImgBurn on Windows, Burn on macOS, or Brasero on Linux. Most modern burners handle CD Text, which displays the track name on a compatible head unit. Australian cars built after 2010 generally read CD Text without trouble, while older imports may show only "Track 01".

Insert a blank CD-R, not a CD-RW, because many older car stereos refuse to read rewritable media. Set the burning speed to 8x or lower for the most reliable result, especially if the disc will live in a car parked under the Queensland sun. Slow burns produce fewer errors at the edge of the disc, which is exactly where the final tracks sit.

Verify the disc in a different player before you consider the job done. A quick test on a portable boombox in the kitchen often catches issues that the burning computer missed. If a track skips, re-burn at a lower speed or check the original WAV file for a glitch that needs editing.

Staying on the right side of Australian law

Format shifting for personal use sits inside the Australian Copyright Act 1968, which allows you to copy music you already own onto another format you own. That covers the cassette-to-CD and vinyl-to-CD projects described here, provided the resulting files stay inside your household and you do not share them online. The same law applies to LPs bought at a record fair in Newtown and to inherited tapes from a great-aunt in Geelong.

Importing blank CDs attracts GST at the standard rate, and customs duties apply if you buy in bulk from overseas warehouses. Customs also watches for pirated commercial material hidden among personal archives, so keep your original cassettes or vinyl nearby in case an officer ever asks for proof of ownership. The Australian Border Force website lists the current thresholds for personal imports.

Selling copies of digitised music, uploading them to a file-sharing platform, or burning discs for a fundraiser at the local footy club breaches the Act. If you want to share a particular track with a friend, point them to a legal streaming service that pays the rights holders rather than handing over a freshly burned CD-R.

Now is the moment to give that old collection a second life. Dust off the deck, download Audacity, and set aside a quiet afternoon. The mix your uncle made on his AWA cassette recorder in 1987 is finally ready for the glovebox, the kitchen boombox, and the next long drive down the Pacific Highway.