Audacity Editing for Beginners: 16 Tips in 9 Minutes

hi this is uh this was formerly the video known as 12 tips and audacity in ten minutes I got more tips and an update because they changed audacity to version 2.3 point oh so it was time to do a 20-18 edition and I'm not sure what this is gonna add up to something like 16 tips I I'm gonna try to keep it in 10 minutes so let's see how we do first thing first tip is I notice when I started up and updated to point 3.0 I lost all the tools at the top so here's tip number one get your tools back by going to view go to toolbars and hit reset toolbars if you're missing that and that'll restore things for you I'm gonna repeat the exercise we did before because I find this is a good one to work with this is just a recording of a countdown from 10 to zero and thanks to some comments that were in the video 9 8 with any luck you can hear the audio this time so we'll hear what the sound difference is like so tip number one with this when you record something it's a good idea to adjust the amplification of it last time I said use amplified this time I'm upgrading that to normalize effect normalize will try to stretch the waves amplitude up to a reasonable ceiling and it pre calculates at 2-1 DB which is minus like one decibel less than crashing through and potentially clipping your audio you can go to 0 but I would suggest leave a little Headroom and by doing that the wave just got a little bit better the next tip is we have a lot of room noise in this and we default to the Select tool you can hear room noise just by finding what should be blank and listening to it when you hit play you get that buzzing sound and it's present all the way through ten nine eight it's also present through the talking so to scrub that out highlight a chunk of that noise and let's use something called noise reduction tip number two is effect noise reduction it's a two-step process first you have to teach the program what noise sounds like so you get the noise profile for the selected part try not to get any voice in there because you don't want it to distort the voice and now that it knows what noise sounds like select the entire wave effect noise reduction and the default values for this are 12 decibel reduction sensitivity of 6 frequency of 3 I'm going to bump this up to 18 because I know this is a particularly noisy sample and I'm gonna say okay I wouldn't go much more than that and you'll notice what was a buzzy line here now sounds like this and looks nice and flat so we did the job and hopefully it hasn't compromised the voice too much 10 9 8 7 6 tip number 3 it'd be nice to use that select tool to get rid of leading space so you can highlight a chunk and hit delete and get rid of trailing space and delete just to clean up the wave a little bit more so what we have is more signal and less just blank tip number 4 you can zoom in on a chunk of the wave with that select tool as well ctrl e will let you zoom in and even actually see what a wave looks like this is a nice low amplitude wave nice sine wave it's just a little bit of noise in the room once you zoom in like this you want to zoom back so ctrl F will zoom back to show you the full recording that you created again so with ctrl e zoom in ctrl f zu back out next tip we can play around with an additional tool we've just been using select but when we split the clip we can do more exciting things so to split a clip place the cursor where you want to split it go up to edit look for clip boundaries and split or memorize control I and control I will actually fragment this recording into two separate elements and then we can start using the additional tools for instance disc this is the time shift tool more on it later but right now I can I can change time with this having demonized it it plays night like this now ten nine eight seven so you can change the editing flow or you can edit the flow of whatever your recording is and I'll show you another way we can play with split clip as well this is a little more advanced version of it I'm gonna go back to the selection tool and if I want to start really manipulating what was recorded I'm gonna highlight a chunk of what was recorded like this and I'm gonna use a variation of split clip under edit clip boundaries split new and notice the shortcut is ctrl alt I when you do that it not only cuts the clip it'll also put it on its own track this is not stereo this is a mono track that I have here and I'm gonna do that over and over again with ctrl alt I so I'm gonna take this particular exercise and cut it into a new track for each of those words elements numbers I got caught last time I think there's although it counts from ten to zero I think that's actually 11 elements that we have so we should have a limit 11 tracks and for the last one you can just double click on a track now that it's been segmented and send it where it belongs we would kind of like to see these things all the tracks are still there we can scroll down and see them nice and neat but if you want to see them all at once there's a way you can fold them up and and lessen the height of each individual track but make note you've got a lot of controls here we're gonna want to use later so we're gonna have to stretch these things back out again these these tracks height the track height is actually variable like this so you can make it pretty skinny but you lose those controls but if you want to stack them so you can see them all real fast use instead of ctrl F to see everything horizontally we'll use ctrl shift F and it will squeeze them so that we can see everything vertically tip number 10 now we can use something like this control this time shift tool and we could invert the order if we wanted to so instead of having it go from ten to zero I'm going to just quickly reverse these things now here's the other thing you can do this because they're on different tracks we can stack them a little bit like this so they're gonna count down a little faster and that's the reason why you might want to put things on separate tracks is you can just overlap the leading silence and have a little bit more control over these things oops all right I guess I'm gonna move the webcam hopefully that does the job all right if I wanted to move them all control a should select all the clips Wow that's another tip bonus tip control a selects everything in your recording and I could slide all of these to the beginning if I wanted to just like that now you can you can damage it too by sliding it too far so I'm gonna roll down so I can see I'm using the wheel mouse button to see where this really starts and finishes so now I got a recording that sounds like this 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 you get the idea so we're gonna take the even tracks holding down the ctrl key and clicking in ideally a blank little space of the track header here I can select every other track which means I'm selecting every even track and you'll notice that it's a light blue color in this version of audacity all the way to there so you can select specific tracks like this and what I want to do is I want to merge them down to put all the even numbers in the left ear so now that I've selected them with control clicking I can mix them down and here's your next tip with tracks mix mix and render that takes all the even numbers puts them all on the same track and really simplifies the work that we're doing to do the same thing with the odd numbers another trick instead of using control if you want to get them a little faster click the first track you want to render and mix together hold the shift key and click the last one so that selects all the odd number and I'll do the same thing tracks mix mix and render and now I've got sounding like this 0 1 2 3 4 you get the idea all the even numbers are on the first track all the odd numbers on the second and now if I wanted the pan all the even numbers to the left I could drag this a little bit to the left 70% I'll drag this to the right by about 70% and hopefully what we will hear is evens in the left odds in the right one two three four five six seven eight nine ten and you seen the meter there that it's bouncing where it belongs our last tip now that we've gotten this far let's see if we can mix this thing down to an mp3 or a wav file if you like and to save this thing down as a brand new stereo file we go to file we go to export and I'm gonna try taking on the mp3 mp3 is a smaller file and I'm gonna call this thing I don't want to save it with the exact same name so I'll call this mixed alt for the name a little bit if you have the lame libraries installed this should be easy if not you'll get some warnings on how to do this okay ladies and gentleman hope that helped welcome to the 2018 edition of this and I hope this helps as many people as the first video did thank you to everybody who suggested the improvements and I hope that we caught most of them well let's see what you can do good luck

Channel: CyberdogStudios

Views: 556,241

Rating: 4.9497042 out of 5

Keywords: Audacity, tutorial, beginner, sound

Id: WWFvG1-AmNk

Length: 9min 0sec (540 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 30 2018