- Hey, it's Pat here, and in this video, I'm gonna teach you how to
use Audacity, a free software, so that you can edit and
record your podcasts. This is available for
both Mac and PC users. I'll show you exactly
how you can make sure your mics are all set up
properly, your levels are OK. And, also, we'll do a
little test recording, too. I'll show you exactly how to do that. But also, just realize
that this is a lesson that's actually pulled out from my more premium
course, Power Up Podcasting, so it may reference other
parts of that course. If it happens, don't worry about it. Just go in, learn how to
use Audacity and have fun. This is a tutorial for those of you who are going to be using the free tool, Audacity, to edit your podcasts. It's great for recording, for editing, for mixing, for multi-tracks. Similar to Garage Band, it's
great to use and it's free. And to get it, all you have to
do is go to audacityteam.org. Again, that's audacityteam.org and it's great if you're a Windows user because you can just download
it right to your computer. It's also available for
Mac, and also Linux, too. But, mostly, those of
you who are watching this are likely gonna be on Windows
because you've been looking for a free solution to edit
your show, and here it is. I'm gonna show you exactly
how to use it, right now. OK, here we are in a blank Audacity file and the first thing you
want to make sure is that the microphone
that you want to use is the one that's selected
as the input device. And the Input Device area is right here next to this little microphone, and all you have to do is
click on this drop-down menu and just make sure that the
microphone you want is there. And if it's not, if your ATR
microphone is maybe not there, make sure it's turned on,
make sure it's plugged in, make sure it's all good, and then it should be
available for you to select. Then, you could choose
between Mono Input Channel and Stereo Input Channel. And, typically, I recommend
recording your voice with your podcast for Mono, or in Mono, and that means your voice that you record is gonna be heard equally on both the left-hand side
and the right-hand side without any worry of having it pan between the left and right side or having it be only in one ear. It kind of sounds weird when
you're listening to something and it's only coming in on one ear. Now, sometimes, just to warn you, when you import a file
from an external source, maybe it's an MP3 file
that is your interview that you recorded with somebody on Skype or maybe it's the music
that you downloaded online or the voiceover that you
received from somebody, when you import it, typically, it may actually be in stereo. And that's OK, as long
as when you play it back, you're hearing it equally on both the left and right-hand side. That's what matters and,
typically, you won't have to ever worry about that anyway, just kind of wanted to
give you that warning. Now, we're gonna do a test recording here and then we're gonna play around with that file and those tracks. And then I'm gonna import other tracks and show you how to create
an episode on the fly, here, so that you know how to use these tools and then you can move forward with the tutorials in
this particular module. So, to record in Audacity,
all you have to do is click on this red button, here. And then, I'm going to do that right now and just start talking, and I'll play this back
for you in just a minute, but I want you to notice a few things. Right now, you can see
that it's mapping my voice in the form of waveforms, here, and there's little peaks and valleys. And the number one thing
you need to worry about is if those peaks are extending too high, kind of outside of this
region of this track and if it is doing that,
then you are too loud. That's called clipping. Clipping is bad because
when a person listens to an audio file that's clipped,
it's gonna sound distorted. It's not gonna sound very pretty at all. And if you notice that that's happening now when you're testing, and you will be doing a
test to check this out, all you have to do is adjust
the volume on the fly, here, with this little Input Volume slider and that will help you
adjust it one way or another. The best practice, the
best ideal situation is to, as you are speaking normally, in your normal podcast speaking
voice when you are recording that it's never getting
beyond the outer limits here and it's getting as close
to the top as possible. Sometimes, you'll record
it and it'll be very small and, yes, you can sort of
raise the volume levels there, but the best practice,
the best quality audio will be when it's just like this, quite high into the 0.5 to 1.0 region without getting or extending
beyond those parts. Now, I'm gonna click Stop to stop and just kind of warning you that when you are editing your files, which I'll show you in a
second, don't click Pause. When you click Pause and try to edit, actually, all of your
editing features will go away and it'll become very frustrating and you're not gonna know why. If, for whatever reason, you
find that your editing tools are just not working for you, it may be because you
paused instead of stopped. So just practice using the Stop button instead of the Pause
button here on Audacity. Now, you can see that we recorded a nearly one minute and 15 seconds worth of audio here and that's great. I'm gonna click on this button, here, to skip back to the beginning
and then just press Play and show you what happens. That, right now and just start talking, and I'll play this back
for you in just a minute, but I want you to notice a few things. Right now, you can see
that it's mapping my voice in the form of waveforms
here and there's a little. OK, so that works out and
checks out pretty good. Now, what I want to do is, actually, before I start editing and slicing and show you how to move things around, I'm actually gonna import
some music, really quick, and show you how easy this is to do. And then, I'm going to show you actually how to adjust the
volumes of certain things so that your voice can kind
of come over the the music and the music won't be too loud and all those sorts of things. Now, I have a file here, an MP3 file, that I downloaded from a website that has royalty-free music. And this allows me to use it
in my podcast with no worry of somebody like saying,
"Hey, that's my song." So to import these things, and you can also import
voiceovers that you get and also, like I said earlier, your interviews that you have. To put them in here, all you have to do is click on that file and drag and drop it and literally just let go in Audacity and it should map out its own
track for you, right, there. And you can see this song
is about 2 1/2 minutes long. It's a little too long because my voice only
goes over to this part and, of course, remember
this is just a demonstration, so I'm just kind of showing
you how to use the tools, but let's say that I want to remove this end portion, here, of this song. To do that, all you have to do is click on this Selection tool which is typically there by default, but I'm just gonna click
on that and start here, select this area after my
voice and that highlights it. You can see it's a different
color and that's kind of, that's the thing that
I'm focusing on right now and all I have to do to delete that is just click Delete on my
keyboard and there you go. Now, there's a number of different ways to zoom in to this area. My favorite way is just to
Simply click this button, here, which is called Fit Project. You can use these plus and
minus magnifying glasses, here, too, but this will
essentially just have it stretch out to the length of your window, so I'm gonna do that right now so I can see things a little bit better. Now, if I were to click Play, you'll notice that
there's two tracks here. And, yes, there are three lines and that's because this second track here, the one that I just highlighted, this is a song that's actually in stereo. And in stereo, you see
actually the left side and the right side. Now, like I said, because
they're both equal on both sides, you can actually see that here, I don't have to worry about it. It's when you see one of them flat and one of them having sound, that means it's only
gonna come out in one ear and it's gonna sound very weird. You can actually adjust
this if you wanted to using this tool, here, which is the Pan tool and I can adjust it. You'll see the L, here, for
left and the R, here, for right. You can move things to the
left side or the right side. Typically when you're recording a podcast, you don't need to do that. When you're recording music,
then that's more relevant. So, let's see, what I want to
do now is not play it for you because I can tell that when,
if I were to play it for you, the music's gonna be too loud, the voice is gonna be too loud. It's just going to be a
lot of stuff going on. Typically, what happens
when you record a podcast is that the music will come in, and then your voice will come in later, so I'm gonna show you how
to do that, right now. And to move things around,
you're gonna use this tool, here, that's the Time Shift tool
and I'm gonna show you what happens when I do this, right now. I'm actually gonna zoom out a little bit 'cause I know I'm going
to need some extra room. So I'm gonna click on the Time Shift tool and what this allows me to do
is literally move these things that I've already recorded
or inputted around. And that just makes it very easy, and typically these things
will snap into place for you to, you know, places
like in the beginning, and that's how you do that. Now, typically, you're gonna
want to move certain parts. So let's say, for example, that I wanted to break up this in the
middle and then move it. Now, to do that, you
have to actually select the portion of the, actually,
go to your Selection tool, then select the part of the track that you want to kind of
have as the breaking point. Now, quick tip, don't select
this part at the top, here. This will kind of auto-play that part. That's mostly used for music and to listening things over
and over and over again. If you want to select a certain
portion of the timeline, click within a track
that you're working in. So I'm just gonna click
in there, for example, and, as you could see, that just that puts a
little finger right there, showing me that's precisely
where I want the break to be. And, of course, you might need to play it and kind of zoom in a little bit to make sure that's correct. But, for now, I'm just gonna
do this portion right here. I'm gonna break up this
single track, not both tracks, but just this single track only. And to do that, all you have
to do is select that part and go to Edit, Clip
Boundaries, and Split, or you can use Control + I on your PC or Command + I on your Mac. And I'm gonna do that, right now, and you'll see that that hardly
did anything at all, right. It kind of just made
this little black line, but that line's really important because now when I use my Time Shift tool, when I move, this part opens up. Now, I'm not moving the whole thing because it's broken in the middle. And now, let's say, for
example, this is the part in the intro where I wanted
to feature this music, so I want this part, the
music, to stand out here and kind of my voice to go away which is why that's broken like that. Now, I have some little extra
parts here at the end of this, so what I'm gonna do is
actually hit the Selection tool, remove that bit there, and now it's even. Now, let's say I want the beginning to be just the music. So I'm gonna actually
use the Time Shift tool, move this over a little bit, too. So, as you can see, this
is just, just becomes a way for you to play around with things. Now, the other important
thing I want to share with you besides, we did deleting
already, we did splitting. Again, remember, splitting
it's kind of hard at first. You go to Edit, you go to Clip
Boundaries, and then Split. Or you can do your Control
+ I command in your PC or the Command + I on your Mac. Now, the last thing I want
to share with you is to, how to adjust the volumes and kind of have things
fade-in, have things fade-out, all as things are going. And let's do that, right
here, using the Envelope tool. This is to sort of the
volume adjuster tool as I think it should be called instead, so I'm going to click on that. And now, you'll see that
it kind of highlights certain moments of these files, here. So I'm not gonna adjust
the volume within my voice. I always want that to sort
of be at the right volume. The music is what I want to change. So wat I want to happen is, this is, you'll see when you click on
this, it adds a little dot and that dot becomes sort of a point at which the volume becomes
kind of down to that level. And now, I can take this bar
and adjust it a little bit. It actually creates another
dot where I eventually let go and I can move things around a little bit. I can sort of adjust it. So I want the music to start
out, you know, quite loud at that part in the beginning, and then I want to get
softer as my voice comes in. So I'm actually gonna move
it down a little bit more. I might need to actually move
even down more like that. Now, I'm gonna go back to the beginning and just play this for you and kind of we'll just
see what it sounds like. (upbeat pop music) That, right now, and just start talking, and I'll play this back
for you just a minute, but I want you to notice a few things. Right now, you can see
that it's mapping my voice. Now, that was pretty cool, right? Loud music to start,
and then it faded out. It faded out a little early, so what I might want to actually do is kind of move this over a little bit so I begin talking as it's fading out. Let's actually try that. I'm going to go to the Selection Tools, select this part here,
and then click Play. (upbeat pop music) That, right now, and just start talking, and I'll play this back
for you in just a minute, but I want you to note. Now, that's not bad. Now, obviously, when I
clicked Record earlier, it was as I was in the
middle of a sentence, so maybe I can make this
sound a little bit better by moving these things over, and I'm gonna actually record
in the middle of this track, even before all this stuff comes in. So, to do that, just make sure that your track is highlighted,
the one that you want, and then click the Select Tool, I want to start recording at this point, and just hit Record. It's gonna pick up right
where you cursor is, watch. (upbeat pop music) Hey guys, thanks so much for being here. I appreciate you, and you're awesome. Let's keep going here, boom. Oh no, what happened? I recorded up here and I was in this track and now it recorded a new track down here. What's going on, ah? Don't worry, I did that on purpose because this used to really bother me. I wasn't really understanding
what was going on, but here's the deal. When you hit the Record button, whether it's this red button here or you go and click the R button, which is the shortcut to Record, it always starts where you left off or where your Selection tool
is selected in the timeline, but it always adds a new track. If I were to hit record, now, (upbeat pop music) you'll see that it adds a
fourth track, down below, and that's not cool; I
wanted that to be up here. So what's going on? Well, there may be opportunities and times where you want to create a new track and that's totally OK. But if you don't want these things that you mistakenly recorded, all you have to do is
click on the X button at the top left corner of
each of these tracks, here, and that'll get rid of it. We want to record and
add to this file, here. Now, there's a couple of ways to do that, to add to this particular track. The first one is called Append Record and that means to add to
the end of this recording. So when you append this recording, and I'll show you the button
to do that in just a moment, it'll always start where
you left off on this track. The very last bit of audio, it'll just pick up right from there. And to do that, you go to Transport, and then hit Append Record. That'll always work to
record at the very end. No matter where you are
selected in the timeline, here, it'll always start recording
at the end on this side. But I would recommend,
if you're gonna do that, to hit Shift + R because
that's a lot more convenient and it just makes more sense to do that. So just keep that in mind. Now, what is the use case for this? Well, let's say, for example, you're recording on one
single track just like this and you're going fine and then you might be forgetting something you're about to say, so you hit Stop, and you want to pick up
right where you left off because you were gonna
look down at your notes or kind of reframe what
you're talking about or just try and figure out
what to say really quick before you hit Record again. Just hit Shift + R to
continue where you left off. I know it's kind of
weird and inconvenient. But, at first, yeah, it's kind of weird, but you actually get used to it over time. Don't hit this Record button or else it'll pick up
right where you left off, but in a new track and then
you can have to Copy, Paste or drag and drop that
back into that other track which is a minor inconvenience. But all you have to do is just make sure that track is selected. Again, it could be anywhere you want, and then hit Shift + R and it'll add to the that, just like this. So, as you can see, it's just adding to the end of this track, just like that. Now, let's say that you actually wanted to record something here. And remember, we made the intro music loud and we faded out so that we
could come in with our voice. And this part, here, in the beginning of what
we initially recorded was kind of weird, so we're
gonna record something else and add it in there. How do we do that? How do we record right into
a initial track like this? Well, you're gonna actually
have to create a new track and then just Copy and
Paste and put it in there and it's just very simple. So, all we have to do is click Record. And, actually, one thing I like to do when I'm recording a new section is to kind of mute everything else. So, there's a couple things you can do. You can mute the existing things, like for this music,
I'm going to mute that 'cause I know that's playing at this part which I'm going to record over. And then, I'll unmute that when I play it later just to hear it. So I muted it here. Now, this Solo button, that's if you only want to hear that track and everything else means automatically. So, as we can see, that
other track muted, there, and any other tracks would
mute at the same time. So I'm gonna click Mute because
I don't want to hear that and I'm gonna record and, like I said, that we're gonna record it in a new track below this music track, but then we'll do something
with it really quick to move it back up here
and move things around, so. Hey guys, what's up? It's Pat, here. Thank you so much for
joining me on this show. Today, we're gonna we're gonna be talking about this and that, and then also that. So, there you go. So I'm gonna play this back and I'm actually gonna
turn the music back on. And we haven't moved it yet, but I just want to show
you what this sounds like. (upbeat pop music) Hey, guys, what's up? It's Pat, here. Thank you so much for
joining me on this show. Today, we're gonna be talking about this and that, and then also that. (upbeat pop music) So, kind of cool, right? The music came in and then it faded out. My voice came in. I could probably move it
over just a little bit more, like kind of over to here, to give myself a little bit more room. And then, the music keeps playing. It's just kind of like
background music as I'm talking. And then, typically, what would happen is, you would fade that music out, not have it abruptly end like
that as I continued to talk. And that just becomes a very
professional, but easy, way to kind of have a fading sequence into sort of the content of your show and that's pretty cool. Now let's continue on here. I want to get this up here. How do we do that? Well, there's a couple ways to do that. You can double-click on this. Actually, make sure the
Selection tool is on. Double-click on that and hit Copy, or you can got to Edit and Copy. Just come up here and then Paste that and then you can move it around
to where you want to move it using the Time Shift tool,
so I'm gonna do that there. I'm gonna move this back,
and move this around. I'm gonna take this
part off the end there. And then, I'm gonna remove this clip because I've already pasted it. And there you go. So let's listen to this again. (upbeat pop music) Hey, guys, what's up? It's Pat, here. Thank you so much for joining me on. Cool, that sounds great. Now, the last thing I
want to share with you before I show you how to
export with this tool, and then you can get
into the further lessons to kind of walk you through
the entire process, here, of creating your master file, putting your episodes together, all those sorts of things, really easily. If, let's say, for example,
that this section, here, actually let me fit to screen, this section that we
have highlighted here, let's say this is like a
coughing fit that I had or sneeze or a mistake that I know I made. I want to remove that, but then I also want to add into that. So there's a couple ways to do that. Typically, I would just like delete this, but then I would hit Edit,
Clip Boundaries, and Split. You can do that, remember
Command + I or Control + I, and now I can move things around so I can insert a file or audio track or audio recording into that. So I'm just gonna move that around. You know, I got rid of that
coughing fit, which is great, but then I'm gonna hit that, (upbeat pop music)
right there. Actually, that's the
thing you don't want to do is click on this area up here. It autoplays wherever. If you wanted to just autoplay
at a particularly point, just click in the timeline up
here where the numbers are, fly here, with, like that.
(upbeat pop music) That just makes it really easy to listen (pre-recorded track drowns out speech) but, typically, when you are editing, that's very frustrating. And, again, make sure that when you select a certain time point
in your timeline, here, select it within a track like that and you won't have to worry
about it autoplaying like that. But, again, I want to move things around and just kind of make room for a file that I'm about to record. And so let's go into the Selection tool. I'm gonna pick it up right
where I left off, right there, and then I'm gonna hit Record. It's gonna record into a third track, and then I'm just gonna
kind of copy and paste it and put it in there, no problem. Hey, guys, this is what I meant to say. And, there you go, so I'm gonna copy that. I'm just gonna click on that and paste it and move things back to where they were. And, yes, this is gonna take
a little bit of practice. It does seem like it's a
lot of hard work upfront, and it is, but you'll get used to it. You're gonna find that you're gonna make less mistakes over time. I'm gonna delete this. And now, this kind of file has
been inserted into the middle where that coughing fit
was and we are A-OK. That's less common than, say, for example, you know you picked up right
where you left off before, so, typically, you'll just kind of remove the error portion
there, hit Delete, and then things just kind of squeeze
together nicely for you. And then, you kind of
like zoom into that area to kind of get very precise
with where you want to go and how you want things to be cut. And then, you can kind
of fit to screen again and then things just fall
into place which is great. So, there you go, that's how you use the basic editing tools here on Audacity for you to be able to kind
of put your show together. Yeah, so that's how you do it. Now, the last thing I want
to show you is how to export. It's quite simple, actually. All right, to export, all you have to do is go to File, and then
Export, very simple. And then, name it. You're gonna, I'm gonna
name it as Sample File, and then, where to save it. And then, you want to click on the format. Now, WAV file is a very
common audio format, although, compared to an MP3 file, it's significantly larger, so you going to take up more space. If you going to share this with anybody or upload it to any tools, which you will potentially
do later in this course, it's gonna take a little bit longer. So I typically recommend
to select MP3 files, and then the quality can be
anywhere in this upper level. I like 192, it's not a huge deal. When you get into the lower levels, here, which will significantly
decrease the file size, it'll definitely significantly decrease the quality of that file as well. So just keep it in the upper
levels, up here, hit OK. And now, when I hit Save,
there's one more step. It's gonna ask me if I want
to edit any of this metadata. Now, I'm gonna share
with you in a later video exactly how to edit your metadata. You don't need to do it right now, but I would recommend
actually clearing this out because, as you can see here, the artist name, the track title, this is all related to the
music that I imported in here. We don't want that, so
I'm gonna clear that out and I'm just gonna hit OK, and I'm just gonna leave it at that. Your tracks will be mixed
down to two stereo channels. That's totally fine. Don't show this warning again, OK. And then, it's just
gonna think a little bit, and then we are good
to go, and that's that. So that was a deep dive
on how to use Audacity to edit and record your
podcast, which is fantastic, but obviously there's
a lot more components to setting up your podcast
properly, of course. Now, if you aren't
already in my mini class, you can actually get access to that three-day mini
class right now for free, by going to podcastingtutorial.com. It'll walk you through a three-day process to help you get your
podcast set up from scratch, to up on iTunes so that
people can find it. So, if you're ready for that, go to podcastingtutorial.com, if you aren't there already
and taking my mini class. So, thank you so much and
good luck on your show.
