Audacity Tutorial 2020 - Audacity 2.4.1 - "How To Use Audacity" - Noise Gate, Loudness Normalization

ladies and gentlemen welcome back to another audacity tutorial i'm josh meyer of joshmeyerviol.com i'm a professional voice talent i've done over 3000 paid voiceovers i've been doing this a long time and i just so happen to be an expert in audacity i got into this through writing music i still write music super passionate about it i have some new music coming out so keep your eyes peeled for that if you like some of my other stuff um but moving forward today we have the brand new version of audacity 2.4.1 and why is this important and why would we want to upgrade well i'm going to tell you why so just prior to us going into this i want to say big shout out to the entire audacity team they have done it an incredible job incredible there was a bug in the 2.4.0 version and they caught that super fast super fast fixed it then released the 2.4.1 version so big shout out to arturo james crook roger dannenberg steve dalton uh greg paul leland peter sampson awesome dude um bill thank you guys so much you really really provide us with amazing professional grade software so what is new so there's a bunch of new stuff in here and i'm going to focus mostly on what you will be using the most what's going to benefit you the most widely um so we'll run through some of these things and then i'll go into audacity and actually show you uh what they're talking about we now have the ability to view both wave and spectrograms at the same time really cool stuff however that is very advanced so you know if you're not super familiar with frequency and hurt and really really have a strong understanding of that uh i do not recommend using the spectrogram uh and widely you know if you're if you're following my tutorials uh likely you know that's that's gonna be you know a couple steps away from you so we'll go over that another time uh the opus export you know that's a different file type so i mean look at all these file types that they've given us to export in the first place and then they went ahead and added the opus so if you ever need that file in particular you now have the ability to export in that um in that file type which is awesome the things that i want to focus on the most are going to be we now have loudness normalization i'll tell you what that is measure rms now measuring rms is a part of the acx check tool and you know typically you're not going to have to measure rms unless you're submitting to acx so at that level you know you would probably just use the acx tool um but that's also really cool to have but here's a big one really really big one and this is going to be so so helpful to so many people a noise gate they've added a killer noise gate and we're going to go through and talk about how that works they've done some bug fixes this noise gate and loudness normalization in my opinion two of the biggest additions so let's go in here and i'm just going to create a quick recording uh just so we have some sound waves to play with and i'm going to purposefully breathe i know it's a little weird but uh you know i'm trying to create some breaths so that i can give you an example of the noise gate strange i know and often you're probably not going to be breathing that heavily uh unless you're doing like erotica audiobooks or something but um anyway i just wanted to create some breaths so we can play with the noise gate okay let's see here now i'm going to create a new recording so the breaths aren't so crazy aggressive so you know i'm just gonna talk normally and you know you know just kind of do some regular breathing well it's not regular but i'm trying to create some breaths for us um and you know you know just kind of there we go all right you know like normally and i'll turn that up normally and you know you know just all right cool so you get the idea there and you can hear that normally and you know right okay so let's double click this track let's apply that noise gate and chances are it's gonna get rid of that stuff and just scrub it right out for us okay so the threshold is the level that things need to be above in order to pass through so as long as you know and i think it's probably set to 40 um i've got it set to 30 here but we'll start at 40 and so basically anything above negative 40 decibels right now will be passing through the noise gate anything that is below that will be reduced by what i set to negative 40 db um so let's apply this and see how it works now the attack decay you don't want to mess with that too much and you'll find that if you have it too long it's not going to do a lot and if you have it too short it's going to start eating at the actual audio uh that you want to keep and you don't want to manipulate so um you know keep that attack and decay you know right here at about 250. so let's apply this all right let's have a listen back i'm gonna talk normally and you know you know just kind of amazing i'm gonna undo that lee and you know and we'll redo that normally and you know look at that just kind of amazing look at that just cleaned it right up for us amazing and this is super helpful because when we apply our compression and stuff like that the compression deals with the dynamic range and that means dealing with the quiet parts and the loud parts and when we apply compression it will blow up breaths and stuff like that so if we can clean that up with the noise gate and stuff like that prior to applying compression it is super super helpful to us so you know without you know you get the idea let's do it one more time i'm going to undo that lee and you know and i'm going to turn that up so we can have a great listen lee and you know right and we're going to redo that noise gate okay noise gate boom okay and listen back lee and you know amazing like seriously that's amazing and when you have a large chunks of audio like podcasts audiobooks a long narration of any sort this is going to be gold for you gold i will also create i'm going to undo that i'm going to create a duplicate track just so i can show you a couple other functions and features that they've added normally and and i'm going to reapply that noise gate because i'm going to do a side by side again because that's a pretty incredible tool that they've given us okay now they have added the ability i'm going to unmute this so let's say that you have multiple tracks you're recording music or you're doing a podcast you have a guest and of course we can label these tracks but what we can also do now is change the wave colors so let's say you had you were recording a song and you have the chorus and you have the verse and now we can just change the colors and say okay well my verse is green and my chorus is going to be black and so now we don't have to actually you know like listen to it we know exactly what is what prior to even touching the track okay green is me and black is my guest on on my podcast green is my verse black is my course you know uh that's awesome we get to change these colors if you like red you can pick red if you like the blue pick the blue but we have the ability to change these colors and even if you just wanted the color to be changed because you think it looks better or whatever still pretty cool um i want to talk about loudness normalization and before i do that talk normally talk normally and you know all those breaths normally and you know thanks noise gate appreciate it um and you're welcome because this is going to be helpful to you all right so loudness normalization what is that so basically uh it is very useful when you have uh a long playlist of music and what loudness normalization would do is it would average out a long piece of audio and you know how sometimes when you change songs one song will be at a great level in your headphones or in your car and then sometimes it changes songs on the playlist and the next song is like super loud or way more quiet now what loudness normalization would do is it would bring all of those different songs in their dynamic ranges and make them equal so the perceived loudness stays the same there's a lot of congruence so loudness normalization is great for congruence and i will go ahead and just regularly i'll unmute this so we can look at the waves but i will do a regular normalization on the green and we'll do that to the indus industry standard of you know negative three and we'll do a loudness normalization here and you're going to find that the loudness normalization is not going to be as prominent it's not going to be as as actually loud and as in measured in dbs but the perceived loudness will be similar so you can already tell that it did not blow up as big as regular normalization would and loudness normalization will be more useful to you if you have really long playlists of music but it's also relevant if you're doing uh if you have certain specifications that need to be met for a client for television commercials or stuff like that um they have very strict guidelines as to how loud commercials can be and stuff like that um so that's how loudness normalization could benefit you um but you know you may not have to use it unless you're doing a long playlist um or you have certain specifications that need to be met so let's do a side by side and see if we can actually hear a difference here but uh you know it just dawned on me that this track at the bottom has all the breaths so i'm actually going to undo the loudness normalization undo the regular normalization i'm going to just create an exact duplication of the same track so that you know there's no breath in there um you know and it's the exact same so we'll do the normalization on the top and we'll do the loudness normalization on the one directly below normalized to negative three and loudness normalization okay so let's have a play so you know i'm just gonna talk normally and you know okay so you know i'm just gonna talk normally and okay so regular normalization so you know i'm just going to talk normally loudness normalization so you know i'm just going to talk normally not as actually loud once again will be relevant to you if you have client with certain specifications for television commercials or if you're doing a long playlist of music it will make that far more congruent so anyway those are some of the biggest things that will help you the most in the new version of audacity really really cool stuff and if you're not finding this in the new version just make sure you go to effect go to add remove plugins click right here on disabled and it will show you the list of all of the disabled plugins so go ahead and find them and enable them and the noise gate is going to help you a ton the colored waveforms very useful especially if you have a ton of tracks um a ton of takes you have guests you're doing a song it is super helpful um loudness normalization really awesome tool to have the rms fantastic it's already part of the acx check so if you're doing acx you know clearly you don't want to just measure the rms you're going to want to do the acx check but that's a really cool feature to have but the biggest one in my opinion is that noise gate and you heard the difference you heard the difference um we'll do one last side by side of that noise gate really crazy and once again ladies and gentlemen this stuff was made free to us by the audacity team so thank you thank you thank you and i want to say good for you all for watching these videos for bettering yourself this is not about you it's not about me it's not about them it's about us the creative community growing learning and if we're not growing we're dying so i applied the um noise gate we're gonna do no noise gate here normally and you know and with noise gate normally and you know you get the point really cool stuff download the new version i'll leave a link in the description and if you're looking for private help i can certainly help you feel free to reach out until next time stay safe stay positive you know

Channel: VoiceOverMaster

Views: 20,253

Keywords: how to use audacity, Audacity 2020, audacity tutorial, audacity tutorial 2020, audacity 2.4.1, audacity 2.4.1 tutorial, audacity noise gate, noise gate, loudness normalization, audacity loudness normalization, how to use audacity 2020, audacity tools tutorial, audacity tools, audacity noise reduction, audacity breath removal, audacity breath removal plugin, breath removal plugin free audacity, breath removal

Id: Yp49GiZcC8w

Length: 16min 22sec (982 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 01 2020