Merge and Export
The Merge screen is the second-to-last step. It stitches every paragraph in your project into a single continuous track in the order they appear in the Editor, lets you preview the result, and exports the finished audio (with optional captions and markers).
Getting here
From the Editor, click Merge in the top right corner. The button is only enabled when every paragraph has a recording - if any are missing, hover over the disabled button for a hint about which rows are still empty.
What happens when this screen opens
As soon as the Merge screen finishes loading, it automatically runs the merge in the background. There is no Merge button to click - the merge is the default action. A status indicator at the top shows that work is in progress, and when it finishes you see a preview waveform of the full merged take.
If you dragged any rows around in the Editor, those changes are already applied. The merge always uses the current on-screen order, not the order things were originally recorded in.
Layout
The Merge screen has four areas, top to bottom:
- The header strip with a Back button and the project title.
- A summary line showing how many paragraphs were merged and the total length of the merged file.
- The preview waveform of the merged take. Click Play above it to listen end-to-end. Click anywhere on the waveform to seek.
- The Export options block with the captions/markers checkboxes and the "Merge all audio tracks into one" toggle, followed by the Export button.
- The status panel at the bottom - a black monospace strip that prints every action with a timestamp.
The "Merge all audio tracks into one" toggle
This single toggle decides what comes out of the Export step.
When the toggle is ON (the default)
One file is exported. It contains every paragraph stitched together end-to-end, in the order the rows appear in the Editor. This is what almost everyone wants - a single voice-over file ready to drop into a video, podcast feed, or audiobook.
When the toggle is OFF (split export)
One file per paragraph is exported, numbered in order: <stem>-01.<ext>, <stem>-02.<ext>, and so on. The stem is whatever filename you typed in the Save dialog; the numbers always start at 01 with at least two digits of padding (more digits if your project has more than 99 paragraphs).
Use split export when you want to drop each paragraph onto its own track in a video editor (Premiere, Resolve, Final Cut) or a DAW (Reaper, Logic, Pro Tools) so you can layer music, sound design, or J-cuts under specific lines.
Overwrite confirm in split mode
The OS Save dialog only asks about the one file path you type. If you are exporting twenty paragraphs, the OS knows about <stem>-01.wav but not the other nineteen. So the app checks before writing: if any of the numbered sibling files already exist in the destination folder, you get a second in-app confirm dialog warning that they will be replaced.
If you confirm the second dialog, every existing numbered sibling is overwritten without further prompting. Cancel here if you want to pick a different stem or destination folder.
Export formats
You choose the format by the file extension in the Save dialog. Two formats are supported:
- WAV (
.wav) - lossless, uncompressed, big. The "master" choice. Use this when you are going to do further work in another tool. Bit-perfect copy of the merged output. - MP3 (
.mp3) - lossy, compressed, much smaller. Use this when you are publishing the file as-is (podcast, YouTube upload, web download). Encoded at high quality VBR (LAME -q:a 2).
Pick whichever fits your downstream workflow. There is no difference in how the merge itself works - only the encoder run on the final output.
The Export button
Clicking Export opens the OS Save dialog with a suggested filename based on the project's name. Pick a folder, accept or edit the name, choose the WAV or MP3 filter, and confirm. The app encodes the file, writes any captions and markers you ticked, and prints the result to the status panel.
The status panel
The bottom of the screen is a black-background monospace strip. Every action prints a timestamped line:
- Bright green text means success. Successful exports always start with
Success!followed by a summary line. - Bright red text means an error. Read the message - it usually tells you exactly what went wrong (permission denied, disk full, source file missing).
- Dim text is normal progress (merge starting, merge complete, encoding, etc).
Every line is prefixed with [YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS] in your local time so the latest action is always identifiable at a glance.
Captions and markers
The Export options block has four checkboxes for sidecar files (SRT, WebVTT, Premiere/Resolve CSV markers, Audacity labels). They are explained in detail on the Captions and markers page. Short version: tick the ones you want and they are written alongside the audio file in the same destination folder, named after the same stem (<stem>.srt, <stem>.vtt, etc).
The sidecar checkboxes stay available even when the "Merge all audio tracks into one" toggle is OFF. In split-export mode, the same merged-timeline sidecars are written next to the numbered audio files. That way you can line stems back up by their original timestamps inside a DAW.
Going back to the Editor
Click Back in the header at any time to return to the Editor. Any change you make to the Editor (re-record, crop, gain, reorder) is reflected the next time you open the Merge screen - it always re-merges from scratch.
Reference: Merge and Export controls
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Back | Returns to the Editor. Nothing is destroyed. |
| Preview waveform | Click to seek, use Play to listen end-to-end. |
| Merge all audio tracks into one | ON: one merged file. OFF: numbered per-paragraph files. |
| Sidecar checkboxes | SRT, WebVTT, Premiere/Resolve CSV, Audacity labels. See Captions and markers. |
| Export | Opens the Save dialog and writes the audio file(s) plus any ticked sidecars. |
| Status panel | Timestamped log of every action. Green = success. Red = error. |