Audacity: A walk through on the basics of editing audio using Audacity

so audacity is a is a audio recording an editing tool that we use a lot in an instructional media group several of us use it is our primary Audio Editor and the beauty of it is it it's it's very robust it's very flexible it can be as simple or as complex as you want to make it depending on your project and it's 100% free it's free open-source downloadable so um if you just go out and do a google search on audacity download it'll take you to the audacity homepage which you see sitting before you here there are two versions that are kind of their latest production versions there's 1.2 and 1.3 1.3 was never an official release it's a bit of beta it's been in beta for a couple years I just think that they they decided man it's good enough we'll just leave it out there um the only primary differences I can find it between the two is there's just some tools that they've moved around and stuff I haven't read through all the readme to tell you exactly what the differences are I've tried both of them 1 2 and 1/3 I personally prefer one to that the tool palette was what I was used to and I didn't see any gain to go to 1.3 so it's just a matter of personal preference if you start out with 1.3 you'll probably be fine so just completely a matter of personal preference there is one component that you're not going to get when you download this um but that is also free download and I'll show you what that is here when we get to the exporting section of our presentation here so you can just download that for your OS and install it and you'll be good to go so that's probably one of the coolest things is it like I said that it is free I use it at home for for doing personal podcasting I use it for editing songs for for different people for different reasons you know it's just it's really cool really simple to use so I'm going to go ahead and fire it up show you what it looks like so here's what it looks like um it can be a little intimidating when you first open it if you've never dealt with digital audio before and you see all these these funky sliders and tools and buttons but but I'll show you what most of these are and it'll be pretty simple once you get rolling um I don't know what the Dave do you know what the track limitations are on it on audacity I don't yeah I've never reached it I've had as many as 16 tracks running simultaneously when I was tweaking audio different instruments different things so I don't you know most of stuff we do is two or three on audio at most usually it'd be like voice and music is about the only two things that we typically do so you've a couple things to look at I'm not going to go through every single one of these given the time that we have here today but I just wanted to give you enough to get started with the basic tool set so the first thing I'm going to do is I want to go into my preferences and make sure that I have my devices set up appropriately I have my recording device set up accurately and I have my playback device set up appropriately so if I just go to edit and go to preferences first thing it's going to bring up is my audio aisle right now I have my little Microsoft twenty dollar headset plugged in with the mic running right now so my recording device is going to be my headset here it's my Microsoft Live Chat uh I could use the mic inside of my laptop not that great equality we had we've been working on a project with Lynette Stevens and she had some audio that she needed to record and instead of coming in borrowing one of our our headsets she grabbed her son's Xbox headset plugged it in and fired up audacity and recorded her own audio at her house so it's amazing the quality that you can get for a really minimal investment and for playback right now I'm going to have it playing back through my system audio so that you guys could hear it typically if I was editing I'd probably have it playing back through the live chat as well so it'd be playing back through the headphones so I'm going to have it recording through the through the boom mic here and then I'll have it playing back through my my system audio when you first get started really the only preference that you have in here to worry about would be quality um most of the stuff that we do for voiceover quality really isn't a big issue you can drop the quality quite a bit and still get acceptable audio quality last lunch-and-learn I did was about Camtasia and this is a perfect tool for doing voiceovers to export and then drop into your Camtasia projects this is the tool that I typically use when you do that you're probably these that you take the defaults on here your default sample rate of 41 44100 and I'll explain a little bit about what that means here after I record some audio and you can typically just take all your defaults when you export that's when you need to be a little bit more concerned about the bitrate that you're exporting at depending on what your application is if you're going if you're looking for CD quality audio obviously you're going to export at a different quality level than you are if it's something that it's going to be a podcast of two people talking that I'm streaming over the Internet obviously then you're more concerned about file size how much bandwidth it's going to take so you're going to squeeze your quality down a little bit from there so those are my basic tools and you can see up here I've got a tool pallet for editing which I'll talk about here once I once I get some audio recorded I've got some standard what I usually call VCR controls all right I got my fast-forward play got this big red record button if I was to punch the red record button right now I would start recording audio through my microphone it's just as simple as that that's how long it takes you to get set up you load it you say here's my recording device you punch recorded your recording so very very basic um you have pause and stop fast-forward these are some some of your levels that you can set or these meters you'll see playback and record meters coming across here and these are your playback and record levels so if if I want to if I maybe if the sound is coming in too high then I would want to adjust this record level down okay so that my input levels not too high and I'll show you what those look like what that waveform looks like so I'll go ahead and punch the record button and you can see that right now it's actually recording I got my meter going on across the top here it's making the little waveform that if you've watched enough science fiction movies you're probably used to seeing that little waveform or some semblance thereof so right now it's absolutely recording 100% of what I'm saying so to get started in recording it really is just that simple it takes very very very little to get going so any questions No um no dawn for you it is not so now if you see see these certain spots where it's hitting the top and the bottom of my little record band right here that tells me that I'm probably recording it too high a level and when you hit that level you get to you start experiencing what's called clipping have you ever heard listen to an audio recording where even when it's turned down when it gets loud it sounds crackly it sounds like it's breaking up sounds distorted that's what clipping is you're basically you're putting too much volume into the device that is set up for recording so based on that I could look through here and I could drop that level a little bit bring it down I can do it real-time so now I'm not I'm not bouncing quite as big don't have as many problems going on as I did previously so things that you want to be aware of when you're recording I always try to err on the side of recording at a lower volume than I do a higher volume I don't want to push it too much because there's a lot of things I can do in post after the fact if it's too quiet I can amplify that I can do other things to it to get that volume where I want it to be it's a whole lot easier to make it louder than it is to take out distortion or clipping in your final recording another tip here when you are recording you always want to leave some dead space so if I was firing up my recording I'd stop give it 4 or 5 seconds of just clean dead space and I'll show you why that is that's going to allow us to apply a filter so that we can make sure that we pull out any background noise that you may have picked up any any air conditioning noise anything going on in the background any consistent noise we'll be able to pull that out so once I've got my recording all done I'm sitting here I'm reading my script I'm doing whatever yes stick you had a question yeah those are your those are your your levels off of zero um I don't I don't want to get too too detailed in my explanations I'll explain that a little bit here when I go in and start showing you editing but but yeah that's that's how you that's how close you are above and below the zero point so I'll explain that a little bit here when we get get going so this point I could pause my recording and maybe I needed to do something else and go oh I had to go check my script or had to go yell at the dog because it's barking while I'm trying to record or whatever the case may be and then if I click pause again it'll take up my recording right where it was now if I were to actually stop my recording and if I were to click and start recording again it's going to create another track nothing wrong with that I'll show you how that you can take these two tracks and you can combine those tracks if you wanted to there's you know different options there's different reasons why you might want to record separate tracks for example if you were doing music you would have lead vocals and backup vocals so you could record both of those layer those tracks so that they sounded correctly so just use a music analogy there so I will stop so now I've looked at this and and I've decided that this first section here I'm going to I'm going to kill this second track here just for the simple simplicity of use here I Pro I'll pull in a second track here in just a few moments I've got some zoom in and zoom out tool so if I want to see what the whole thing looks like I can zoom out and zoom in and I can see all this clipping in here and that maybe that was where I was trying to set my record levels you know usually if you if you've ever come in and recorded audio for IMG we'll say okay read a paragraph and while you're doing that we're sitting there tweaking levels trying to make sure that the recording sounds right and that everything is good before we actually start doing our published recording so I'm going to come in here and I'm going to say okay I want to trim off all this junk in the front it was garbage I'm not I don't want to I want to listen to it um I can listen to the playback if I want to so pretty good quality for a $17 microphone doesn't do too bad of a job whenever you're editing whenever you're working on your recordings I always recommend doing it through headphones not doing it through speakers the headphones show all Terry just experienced this last week she was recording a project and she said said hey listen to this tell me what you think and I and we were listening through speakers I said try it in headphones and she came back and said it was awful it sounded fine through the speakers but then you hear all the hisses in the Pops and you pick up really pick up all that background noise so I always try to edit when I'm editing or I'm working with audio I always make sure I do it through headphones just because it seems to pick up a lot more of the detail so I've decided it this first section I want to dump and so I'm going to find myself an edit point I'm going to edit say from right here so I just click there and right now I'm on this this is my editing tool palette right here I'm on the selection tool so I want to select a section to edit out so all I got to do is grab here highlight the section that I want to delete of course if I was zoomed out this would go quicker I'll zoom out hit the Delete key the way it goes so I just cut that piece of audio off of it simple as that now before I get going too far in my editing process now I've kind of got this is the rough the rough file this is the stuff that I want to pull all together there's two things that I always do and this is just personal preference this is just my workflow that seems to work for me the two things that I always want to do is I want to run a background filter to pull out any background history noise in the background and the other thing I want to do is I want to amplify the signal as loud as I can possibly get it something that I found really interesting is if you go out and pull a pull of piece of music that was recorded say late 70s early 80s then pull a piece of music that was recorded recently and compare the waveforms these waveforms on the - you'll see that the stuff that has been recorded recently is actually much much louder they've done they've done tests and most people think that if it's louder it's a better quality and so what the recording studios do now is they push the limits and they try to make that track let as loud as they possibly can without getting distortion because people mistake that loudness for a higher quality recording so it's amazing if you take those two pieces of audio import them in the waveforms they look completely different even though it can even be the exact same music but recorded it two different times just based on what the trends were and recording at the time so what I'm going to do is first is I'm going to run this filter if you can see I got this flat spot right here that's where I was leaving my quiet space so under here under effects I've got a whole list of tools they're all grayed out right now the reason they're all are effects and the reason they're all grayed out right now is because I don't have anything highlighted I mean I highlight something it's going to give me the ability to run an effect on there so I'm going to highlight this section of dead space using my selection tool I'm going to click effect now that I can run all these effects on there and the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go down and use this noise removal when I pull up the noise removal now if you do run 1.3 this tool does look different this noise removal filter does look different when you open it up but it effectively does the exact same thing and this is a two-step process the first step one we need to get the noise profile so I've left that dead space in the recording and I'm going to let the tool learn what dead space sounds like so that it can go and remove any of those background hisses pops whatever it may be so I'm going to click get noise profile and you want to have they tell you a minimum of a second and a half I usually you know the longer is better so usually when I walk in the booth and I'm ready to record something I'll leave 10 or 15 seconds of dead space on the front of it before I ever start recording so now I've got my noise profile now I want to highlight the entire track and I'll just do it ctrl a just like I would on any other software tool right select all I'm going to go to effect and I'm going to go noise removal again now when I do this it says okay what level of noise removal do you want to do and it's going to default right to the middle if I preview it gives me a preview doesn't sound too bad one thing I can tell you is right now if I were to leave that there and I were to do a noise removal and listen to through my headphones it would not sound good it's going to get a very robotic sound to it because what happens is if you have the noise removal' up too high it starts to go in and remove certain frequencies and tones in your recording so it'll sound almost you know you're familiar with auto-tune right here all the songs now that are Auto tuned it'll sound almost like that because it's removing certain frequencies in your voice path so I usually drop this guy way down yeah I usually bring it somewhere you know within the bottom quarter of noise removal and I you preview it make sure it sounds good again it's hard to tell through these little speakers what it's doing but and then once I've got my selections made I can click remove noise and it'll go through here just take a few seconds depending on the length of the track and it's removed all the background noise now what the big thing that that does for us is it's going to clean up our edit points almost all audio in the background has some form of background noise in it might be might be a solid tone might be white noise might be something that you hear there in the background what will happen is if that background noise is very visible or you can really hear it as you create edit points you'll hear little pops in that background noise even though there might not be any talking or any sound going on at that point there's still that background noise so as much of the more background noise that you can remove the better your edit your into edited sound is going to is going to be so that's why the first thing I always do before I start the bulk of my editing as I go through a noise removal process okay any questions now the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to amplify the track and use my amplify tool now what audacity is going to do is it's going to do most the work for you when I click amplify it's gone through already and it said okay based on the selection of audio that you've provided to me the most that I can amplify this without experiencing clipping is 1.5 dB in this case okay so it's already done that work for me if I try to go above that the OK button gets grayed out it says wait a minute I have to actually tell it look I know that it's going to clip and I'm okay with that so if we go back to our 1.5 dB it was 1.5 right I thought it was okay it's happy now and watch what will happen when I click OK it'll go through if you watch the waveform don't wait for him just grew a little bit so just amplified my sound a little bit now I do have the ability to adjust the volume of a specific track inside of my mix using a slider over here so let's say I had I had two people talking back and forth so I had them recorded on separate tracks one person was quieter than the other I could go in there and say I'm just going to bring that person up a few DB listen to it and sit there and can do my adjustments okay give it a listen sounds pretty decent yes rummy mm-hmm absolutely using your panning here mm-hmm absolutely you could push one all the way to left one all the way to the right and have them talking on both both sides of the of the stereo mix so far so good okay as far as editing it really is I mean you already saw me remove that first piece is we'll just sit here and listen to it well now I've got this dead space in here I didn't want that dead space in here so I'm going to zoom in on it I'm going to go okay I'm just going to highlight that I just cut that piece of dead space out using my delete key it really is that simple so when we when you record and say you have your script in front of you recording audio for a piece of learning or whatever your application is as you're going through there who Barnes & Noble has deals as you're going through they're probably not actually they are I did get a free ebook this morning um as you're going through there okay you go okay this take was bad take it out this take was bad take it out oh that take was good and you'll get an eye for it if you actually watch the waveform you'll notice that when a person says a word it's the waveform is going to look similar even if they say it incorrectly at different volume so you'll go so when you look at the waveform you're gonna be like okay they tried it here they screwed up they tried it here they screwed up without even listening to it okay there's the good one and you'll be able to chop those out and pull it out just visually looking at it you'll be able to tell that so it's pretty slick from that from that standpoint it just takes a little bit of getting used to so that as far as the editing goes real simple highlight delete that's removing sections you have a lot of other toys in here that you can do with effects you can change the pitch you can change the speed you can make them sound like they're Chipmunks right so I can come in here and go okay you have changed the change the tempo which is interesting it's different than change the speed it will compress all of these the slow low volume spots and so it will actually increase the speed of the track without changing the pitch of the track so I can go in here and say I want to speed it up philip's I didn't want to do that control-z so you can kind of kind of hear it there it just gives you a little bit of you go okay I see what it's doing there let me highlight a whoops always controls these always undo right um you have echo effects you can fade in fade out you have invert you want to play it backwards you can do that okay just tons of different tools that you can mess with usually for what we're doing most of them don't apply every one small I might go in depending on who's in there change the pitch a little bit maybe put a boost up the base make it sound a little more full depending on how the recording sounds so wah wah while I was a guitar effect okay so so you can see there's all kinds of different tools and stuff you can have fun playing around with them I remember when I first got audacity I probably spent many many hours in there go and make it people sound goofy and all kinds of weird stuff so um we'll talk a little bit more about these other tools here when I bring in another track but that really is the basics of starting recording audio editing audio it is truly that simple there's not a whole lot to it if you wanted to record a lecture and Canadore you wanted to record a voiceover for a piece of learning that you're putting together so there any questions on that I'll show you how to get get it out of audacity here in a few moments absolutely absolutely this is a this is the exact tool that we're recording some podcasts on Monday and this will be the tool that we're going to be using to record those we're just going to have two mics running in through a mixer board plugged into a laptop and fire up on Assateague click record and walk away so yeah really simple oh yeah Dave and I were taught we're discussing how cheap this stuff is compared to when when I was in bands in the in the late 80s early 90s and it was like you know you'd pay I remember paying over a thousand dollars for a four-track recorder so yeah something that you can you can do so here remove software budget got it we can do everything with free Don just wrote on the board remove software budget everything's free uh-huh um you know it depends on what your what is your end goal I mean it really depends if you're developing a piece of learning um you know we always Dave and I go back and forth about how short we can make something it's like how fast can we make it how short can we make it and still obviously be effective you don't want to compromise quality for for the sake of length like the podcasting that we're that we're going to start recording and putting out we're looking 10 15 minutes max keeping in mind that you know any one topic most people are going to get bored of you know it's not we're not doing a morning radio show where you know you have multiple topics in comedy and all that kind of stuff it's just we're trying to get a piece of information out expose somebody to something so we're going to keep it probably 10-15 minutes at most so you know if if you were going to let's say record a lecture or record a piece that you were going to give to students say go back to your hotel room tonight and listen to this I would say 10 minutes take notes we'll talk about it tomorrow so the nice thing is is and it's the good thing and the bad thing is that because you don't have interactivity you can be very concise you would be surprised at the amount of information that you can cover in ten minutes ten minutes is a long time and you can cover a ton of information and that in another amount of time so I mean if you think about most TV sitcoms right they're only twenty-one minutes so you can tell the whole story and get through everything in 21 minutes you know you could do a lot with 10 so coop um I don't know if there is I have run the tool for an hour and a half without stopping recording and haven't had any problems yet I have noticed that we've had a couple people recently have a few issues with it dropping audio and I think it's a resource issue where you know these files start to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger so I think it's probably the limitation of your PC's where really where the limitation is you eat a file that's cached and it's so big that your PC starts choking on it so oh I definitely recommend shutting everything that you can down if you're going to record audio also don't forget to turn off communicator don't forget to mute your cell phone don't forget all of those lovely things as well you know those are just just basic basic good practices so you can tell right now I don't have email running I've got communicator shut down I've got pretty much everything disabled on my PC so all right well let's say that this music or this tracks okay but I want to add some background music to it so I'm going to go out and I'm going to go to project I'm go import audio just so you know that if you do this under 1.3 import audio will be under the file menu go import audio and I've already got some music set up here that I've been that I've got that I knew I wanted to import it's going to import an mp3 file do do there we go so now I've got audio now look at how full that waveform is compared to what I just recorded you know so obviously it's very very different this is a highly produced track that came out of a music studio so obviously it's a whole lot different than my seventeen dollar microphone in my laptop sitting in a conference room so I can take these tracks I've got a tool here for a time shift tool I can grab them and move them around okay so I could say let's say I know that I'm going to want my audio to come in here because I want the or my vocals come in here so I want this cool little musical leading just like you hear on you know any like the news right it comes on you get the little music lead and then this stuff flies at you so but I don't want to leave the volume of my my music at full volume right because it's going to drowned out the conversation I'm trying to have so I've got this cool little tool here called an envelope tool so when I click this envelope tool I'm going to zoom in here there we go so here you see my music track down here my my other track up here and you see I got the two little arrows one point up one point down I can just do a double click right there and I can do a click here and I can create I can create that volume envelope okay so now if I listen to this oops I got to go back to my selection tool okay ooh-ah right simple as that yes you can adjust your so I can come in here oh I guess I'm sorry I can't I can't do it while it's playing and also um this is a mistake that I would make with audacity when I first start using it is I'd hit the pause button and it won't let me do anything I have to actually stop the track and then go in so then I could do the same thing at the back end say okay there's my there's where my audio ends I'm going to fade my music back up okay simple as can be it's the only bad part about doing these sessions is I think damn it you people think that we're smart back there and we do cool stuff and then you see how simple it is you like ah much more on its back there bunch of lackeys man yes mm-hmm mmm-hmm now I can come down here I can still come down here and grab this as long as I have my envelope tool run keeping in mind that there's two points right so there's one here and there's one over here so I would need to adjust both of those okay make sense all right so now any questions we did so far cool yeah um if I talked a little bit earlier about that that was that sampling rate for two 4100 um I want real briefly I just want to mention what that is because there's a lot of misunderstanding of people they're used to using digital audio and they know that it's I don't know I got this mp3 file that I listen to it's 128 whatever sample rate whatever well one of the big complaints that people had when digital audio first came out is that it's not true 100% audio I'd say it's just numbers right it's ones and zeroes so there's gaps in there there's these little nuances that you miss so when I looked earlier and I looked at this preferences here I said that my default sample rate was forty-four thousand one hundred Hertz that means that I'm actually sampling this audio file forty-four thousand 100 times per second okay so I'm getting forty four thousand one hundred little notations every second that say what that sound is supposed to sound like at that exact moment and I can actually see these points if i zoom in on this track and I zoom way and can you see those little tiny dots there's a little dot there like those are the actual sample points of that audio so so how the program how digital audio works is each one of those is a moment in time where there's a numerical value that says this is what that audio is supposed to sound like okay and it takes and it draws a natural curve between those two points so it simulates what it should sound like between those two points that's how digital audio functions whereas with an analogue audio let's say an LP or a magnetic cassette recording you actually get that full analog wave so that's the main difference between digital audio and analog audio that's why people there's some purists quote-unquote purists who say that digital audio is horror because you are technically missing out on something now can my $20.00 ear hear a 20,000 dollar analog recording no I have a $20 error I'm recording with a $17 mic I know that I can't hear ya but I could actually grab this little pencil this little draw tool and I could move each one of these points yeah I only got to do 44,000 100 per second so now you know why record producers makes the money I get money they do um so I just wanted to give you a brief explanation of what that stuff is so and you can see these are the that's at 27 second twenty seven point three eight five zero two zero seconds so yeah so now you understand when we talk about sample rates now you can see I just adjusted that one sample point all out of whack you won't be able to tell you'll never know the difference yeah all right now so I've got this audio recording it's great it's fantastic and let me just chop the end off of this and well actually here here's what I would actually do is I would probably make a cut right here let me zoom out a little bit more delete that and if I want a nice smooth fade transition I can just highlight a section go effect and go fade out well it'll just put a nice little fade on there so I just want that music to come back in and then just fade out okay so now I want to export this right I want to give it and put it somewhere that's usable I want to put it in my mp3 player I want to put it on my cell phone I want to pull it into my Camtasia recording I go file and I go export now I've got two options here I've got exporters wave exporters mp3 I also have options below that to say export selection so if I just had a piece of this that I wanted to export that I didn't feel like editing it all out I could come in here and I could just highlight a section and just say well actually all I want to do is edit or export that chunk that I have highlighted yeah I'm going to export the whole thing yeah exactly actually what we do with Chad's outtakes is I have two of these sessions running simultaneously and I go copy paste copy paste copy paste so you have a couple of of options here this this one you will never use okay the OGG Vorbis um that's a European format that's used you'll typically use mp3 or WAV I usually use mp3 now if you have just downloaded audacity and you try to export as an mp3 it will say and I don't have an encoder for mp3 go download the lame encoder encoder it's actually called the lame encoder the lame mp3 encoder you can just do a search on it there's many many places where you can download it for free it might even be on beyond here no yeah but you can just go out and download the lame encoder and there's even instructions will say download this file put it here you're happy so what so the first time you try and export it as an mp3 it's going to go hey wait a minute you don't have the encoder where's it at you go oh and you point it to it you go it's right here it goes okay I'm happy and you'll never have to do it again know exactly that is lame booooo so or I can export it as a wave pretty much pretty much all of your programs can handle waves I use mp3 because it is a little more Universal I don't see any quality lost between the two wave is Windows audio I don't remember what the V stands for mmm-hmm I do mp3s all the time yep I use them all the time I don't ride so so if i click export mp3 here it's going to say first it's going to say give it a name I'll give it a name we'll call it it's going to ask me if I want to put in some some metadata you know when you're on your mp3 player or your phone or your Windows Media Player it pops up and it says the title the artist the album you can fill in all of that you can put John rrah on there as well for meta tagging so you can put all that tagging in there click OK and it exports your mp3 Fly file down away you go yes you're looking for the encoding rate um now that the sampling rate in the encoding rate don't are actually there are different variables you take how do I not get too technical if you take the sample rate and the bit depth combine those you get the end algorithm sorry I the only thing you really need to know is that if you if it's encoded at 360 is considered CD quality usually anything above 128 is considered acceptable for music playback week we've gone as low as 16 for straight vocal and it actually sounds okay it's not fantastic but it sounds okay I believe I'm trying to remember because I don't typically mess with I can tell you how to do it on one dot 3.6 quality tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu I'm just trying to look here to see if I have my export quality for yeah here you go okay there's your exporting quality for mp3 so I can go in here and and say what it's at I said typically I went if I have stuff that I'm pushing into a project I usually encode at 128 128 still considered CD quality has a pretty small file size if it's something that it's an audio file it's just a voice over like we were messing with the podcast the other day we got a twenty what is a twenty-one and a half minute audio file of somebody speaking down to two and a half Meg and it was still listenable it was still still good enough to be listened to very listenable one of the things to keep in mind and this is something that I learned when I started doing video work with these guys is audio is half of video so if you have a visual display you're putting together people will sit through bad video but they will not sit through bad audio so you can have the most gorgeous visuals in the world but if the audio sounds horrible people will not watch it you can have screwed up visuals but as long as the audio is good quality people will watch it so and if I can go out here and look at this to do there's that mp3 and I could open it with Windows Media Player Oh Windows Media Player is playing back through my headphones sounds great my headphone sounds beautiful so yeah take my word for it come on there we go now the one other thing I'm just going to kill it when you save these you can do it it'll save a project and it'll actually create an audacity project file for it and it's going to create a few different files so I just saved my project if I go in here I can see there's the AUP audacity audio project and then there's all of the files that it created that make up that AUP these what these are are is I believe that these are just individual sound files and edit points you can't play them you can't do anything with these these are strictly for audacity you have to export it out of audacity to make it anything it's playable exactly you want to go back to that audio file that happens you know we'll get like I send a project out for review you guys look at it and you come back and go can you change this audio it turns out oh I rerecord it maybe chopped in a section or move some words around and you get really creative when you go man I don't want to rerecord that if I move this word oh I said that word over here I can chop that out and drop it in here and they'll never know so yeah well it's not even going to save you Rob recording either if you don't save the audacity file it's only going to save whatever you exported so now I'm going to open up another audacity project you see I've got two instances of it running now and we had talked about one of the things that I said in the and the notice for this that I wanted to create a ringtone right something really really simple I'm an import a song I'm going to create a song I've got I'm going to recreate it a ringtone for my wife okay so this is the audio file that I'm going to use I want to make sure I know it's your calling okay and anybody who knows my wife knows that that's fitting so I going to go okay I'm going to listen I'm going to say okay I want to cut that say right here okay so I'm going to grab that and then all I'd have to do is export that as an mp3 and get it into my phone use my Dropbox use whatever I wanted to let's say I had a smaller section of music I had just like a 10 second I wanted that to loop I wanted that to play over and over again all I had to do is highlight what I want to loop and I come up here and I have an effect right tell me I have one wrong version oh there it is yeah they call it loop in the other version I use one version at work in one version at home so you can see right here it says if you repeat it ten times it will last eight minutes and 40 seconds that's a way to long say I want it to repeat twice all right and if I do that I go okay okay and it just throws it loops it repeats it repeats it forever however long I want it to then I could just take that and I could go file export as mp3 you go save it tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu that's all there is to it put it in your phone however you see fit personally I use Dropbox big fan of it guys ever use Dropbox very cool Dropbox just teach you how to get it into your phone email it to yourself just download it off an email make that your ringtone so all right well I mean that's the basics of it that at least gets you rolling any questions uh-huh it is not free but off Amazon we've got a couple of them yeah we've got a few of them floating around the building so if you do want to use one if you're going to record something just let us know we'll throw in your way this one's my my personal one ie I bought this one because they use it for Skype all the time talking on the phone at home so yeah I throw it plug it in and call my parents and Idaho or my nieces and nephews in California and it's free that way so alright any questions little thanks for your attention appreciate appreciate you showing up if you have any questions about audacity I don't claim to be an expert I've just used it a fair amount there's tons of stuff out on YouTube it is a very very very popular tool so most of the lot of guys that do screencasting do podcasting and stuff use it as their tool of choice so there's tons of tutorials available out there for anything you're looking to do some people do very very creative things there's other applications that you can download to partner with audacity that will allow you to record two-way conversations via Skype for doing phone interviews there's a lot of cool stuff like that that you can do with it as well so alright I haven't I've done that but not with audacity um I I don't I don't know what the end result would be with audacity I'm sure there's people that have I'm sure if you go into a youtube search on it that there's somebody out there will tell you here you can pull they use these filters and do this and this and this and you'll get a you know a decent sound quality out of it so all right well thank you very much

Channel: Rich John

Views: 626,192

Keywords: AudacityDemo

Id: PrN9mYXvrsk

Length: 44min 19sec (2659 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 04 2012