Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's
take a look at editing audio in GarageBand. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a
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content and course discounts. So GarageBand is a great free app from
Apple that you could use to make music. You could record an instrument, you could
build your own music track, loop things, add drums, and all of that. But you could
also use it just to edit audio. So if you have an audio file and you need to trim
it or you need to merge two audio files or maybe mix two different audio files together
you could easily do that in GarageBand as well. Starting off here in GarageBand
when you create a new empty project it's going to ask you to put a track in there.
Since we're going to be working with plain regular audio we want to use this track here with
the microphone. It's a regular audio track. So we'll create this new document here and we
can see here is that track that was created. We can see some settings down below. We can see
a library here on the left. We can close that to give ourselves a little more space here.
There are various other things. In order to work with audio in GarageBand you don't open
the audio file. GarageBand has to work with a GarageBand project. So you want to create
one of these projects then bring the audio in. Let's prepare a little bit first. The first
thing we want to do is turn off the metronome here and the Count-in. We don't need those for
this kind of project. Also click here and change from using Beats to using Time which is more
applicable when just editing audio files. Now to bring in the audio all we need to do is
Drag and Drop. So behind this GarageBand window I've got a Finder window with some audio files.
I can take one of those and drag it in and put it right here at the beginning of this first sound
track. This is just some spoken audio (Hi, this is Gary and this is my show all about wombats). So
we can play to hear any portion of it. We can move the playback head anywhere we want and continue
playing (later on I'm going to interview a wom). So now if we want to actually want to trim some
off the end, like let's say we just want to keep this section here, and kind of trim it at
this point we can do it one of a couple ways. One way is we can move the cursor to the end of
the track. When you do notice that there are two portions there. The upper portion and the lower
portion. The upper portion deals with loops which is something you would use if you're making
music. In this case we just want to trim this plain audio. So we want to use the lower portion
here which is the end of the track. We can click and drag that in to cut-off everything after that.
You could easily expand it back again or move it to change it if you want. The audio doesn't go
away. As a matter of fact it stays there. If I were to Save this as a GarageBand project that
track would continue to have that extra audio in. Now if we were to export this from GarageBand
now we would get this audio and it would stop here except that it would continue to play lots of
silence because the track is actually longer than the 20 seconds here. If we scroll over we could
see that this is the end of the track past the one minute mark. So I want to drag that in and
place that close to the end of the track maybe with a little bit of extra silence at the end. So
that's now the length of the track and now I can export this as a new audio file that's trimmed
missing the end there. In a few minutes we'll take a look at exactly how to export. But first
let's look at some other things that we can do. What if I wanted to put another audio track,
merge two audio tracks together. Well, I can drag and drop a second track, let's do this
one, and I can put it in another track by itself. But in this case I'm going to put it after the
first track, like that. So now I've got this first bit here, and it's been trimmed. Then some
silence and then starts this next piece. So I can adjust this as I like to get the pause just right.
So I can adjust this maybe a little less there. I could also trim this track as well. You could
see here the end of the track is moved because it needed to make space. Let's move that in. So
now I've taken two pieces of audio and placed them together. When I export it's just going to
be one audio file with both of these things in it. Now what if we wanted to mix things. So actually
have two sounds playing at the same time. You may have noticed I've got a little song here and I
could drag that in. But instead of into this track I'm going to drag it down below and add it as a
second track. This is some music. So now when I play, and I'll move the playback head all the
way to the beginning, it's going to play both the audio spoken here and the music. Now you
could include as many tracks as you want. So I could add a third or fourth for instance. One
thing you may want to do is lower the volume of one of these tracks to get the mix just right.
So you can see here on the left I've got volume controls and we can lower the volume down for
the song here so that the audio is predominate and the music is just in the background. We can
test that out (playing audio). Now this song is really long here so we want to trim that
as well. So let's bring the end in here and scroll over. Bring it so it's right about there.
Maybe have the music continue a little bit longer afterwards. Then let's bring the end of the track
in, something you're going to be doing a lot. Once you have the end of the track right about there
now we've got some spoken audio and some music in the background set at a good volume. One thing
we may want to do is have the music fadeout. You can do that by viewing Automations.
Automations will allow you to change the volume over a period of time. That's why it's automation.
It's an automatic change of volume. So we go to Mix, Show Automations. It's going to show us the
automation for each of these. In this case Volume. If you look closely here there's a yellow line.
If I select this track instead you can see this yellow line appears here. This is the volume level
because remember this line was lower than this. I can click in here to create a point and
then another point and then have it change between them. So I can go to about here, click
for one point, click here for another point, then I could click and drag this point down.
Now the volume will decrease starting here. So we'll get a fadeout with the music.
Now there's a quick way to do that since fadeout is do common. You go to Mix, Create
Volume Fadeout on main output. When I do that you get this master track here. I could actually
Hide or Show the master track which allows you to set an Automation like this but that covers all
the tracks instead of just this one. So you can see here it does a fadeout over several different
points here at the end. I don't want to do that here. I've already created my own fadeout
so I'll Undo and I'll Hide the master track. So now that we've done all of that it's time
to Export this. We can double check again to make sure the end of the track is here so there
won't be a lot of silence there. We've got a good volume level set here. Notice the volume
looks smaller there. If I drag this over the volume level will change depending upon
where I'm at because I have that fadeout. One thing to keep in mind is that you can use
this control here to Zoom in or out. See more or less of what you're woking with which will
help in setting all of this up. Now let's Export. So to Export all you need to do is go to Share and
then use Export Song to Disc. Here we can select what type of file to use. So AAC is a really good
standard to use. You can set it to four different quality levels. You can go to MP3 if that's a
requirement for whatever it is you're doing. Or use the AIFF or Wave file format. I'll just stick
with AAC. I'll go to the highest quality there. I'll give it a name and I'll set it to this
directory that I was using before and export it out. You can see the progress shown right there
by the playback head. Let's hide GarageBand. Now we can see there is the new file there and it's a
combination of all three of these. (playing audio) I just want to show you a few more tips.
I told you before that you could trim the end of a track by grabbing it like that. You
could also move the Playback head to a certain point and then if you go to Edit, and you see
Split Regions of Playhead, which is Command T, so you can do Command T to split this up. So this
allows you then to move this piece somewhere else if you want or simply just delete it. So that
could sometimes be a faster way to trim things than actually dragging from the end. It's
also a really good way to get rid of things at the beginning. So I could have selected this
one and gotten rid of it. You could also go, here's the beginning, and trim off the beginning
as well. Then perhaps move this over to fit. Now maybe while you're working on the spoken
audio here you would maybe want to silence the music so you could mute a track that way. Or,
alternatively, you could click the headphones here and that solos the track. In other words
all other tracks are muted except the ones with this turned on. Also, one of the
things you may want to do is filter. So let's filter these two pieces of audio here.
I'm going to Shift Click to select both of them. Let me go back to the Library here and you're
going to see filters here in the Library because I have a regular audio track selected. I could
go to Voice and I can change the voice here. What's useful for choosing one of these is to
set the cycle to On. This will give you this little piece here and it will just keep looping
through this. So as I play this will just loop and then i can try some of these different
things. Notice all of these controls here will change as I pick different filters.
(playing many audios with filters). I think the narration vocal probably works best
for this. Now when I export it will have that narration vocal filter applied to this track.
So you can see it's fairly simple to actually edit audio in GarageBand. A lot of people are
intimidated by GarageBand because there's so much you can do in it. But if you just want to stick
to basic audio tracks, trimming things, putting in maybe two tracks into a mix and changing
the volume for one, some simple fadeouts, and some filters it's actually fairly simple to use.
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.
