IntroductionWelcome| 00:00 | Hi! I'm Garrick Chow.
| | 00:05 | Welcome to Up and Running with Audacity.
| | 00:08 | This course is designed to present the basic
tools and skills you'll need to start recording
| | 00:11 | and editing audio files.
| | 00:13 | I'll show you how to import and play
existing audio files in Audacity, as well as how to
| | 00:18 | set up your computer and record original audio files
from scratch, including multi-track audio projects.
| | 00:23 | From there, I'll show you how to perform
basic editing tasks like copying and pasting audio
| | 00:27 | and splitting clips. And we'll also look at
more advanced functions, such as using Audacity's
| | 00:32 | envelope tool to automate volume changes.
| | 00:34 | I'll also cover some of the most common tasks
you'll perform in Audacity, like adding compression
| | 00:39 | and exporting your completed project in formats
that can be opened by other audio applications.
| | 00:44 | We'll be looking at all this and a lot more, so
let's get started with Up and Running with Audacity.
| | 00:48 |
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| Using the exercise files| 00:00 | If you're a Premium member of the lynda.com
online training library, or if you're watching
| | 00:04 | this title on a disk, you have access to
the exercise files used in this course.
| | 00:08 | In the exercise files you'll find folders
for each chapter, and within these folders
| | 00:12 | you'll fine either single
audio files or project folders.
| | 00:16 | To open the Projects, open the folder
and then double-click the .aup file.
| | 00:20 | Now we will open the file in Audacity as
long as Audacity is installed on your computer.
| | 00:25 | To open the single audio files, such as the
WAV or MP3 files, choose File > Open in Audacity,
| | 00:34 | navigate out of the file, and open it.
| | 00:39 | I cover other and more efficient ways to open files in
the first chapter, in the movie called Importing audio.
| | 00:44 | So you may want to adopt one or more of
those techniques after you watch that movie.
| | 00:47 |
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1. Getting StartedWhat is Audacity?| 00:00 | So what exactly is Audacity?
| | 00:02 | Well, since you're watching this course,
you probably already have at least a vague
| | 00:05 | notion that it's a piece of
software for editing audio.
| | 00:09 | What makes Audacity so appealing is probably
the combination of its power and its price.
| | 00:13 | Its power is impressive. You'll find certain
tools and abilities that match pro level audio
| | 00:17 | editing applications. And its price is 100% free.
| | 00:21 | Audacity is open source software, meaning
that it's a result of a collaborative effort.
| | 00:25 | Multiple developers work on it and are
constantly tweaking and improving it, and it's distributed
| | 00:29 | freely, meaning anyone can
download and use the software for free.
| | 00:33 | But that also means there's no real customer
support to speak of. You generally can't call
| | 00:37 | a number to get help with open source software.
| | 00:39 | But Audacity does have pretty thorough
documentation and an active community you can participate
| | 00:43 | in to ask questions and
even offer your own advice.
| | 00:47 | Just go to forum.audacityteam.org to
browse their forums. And for being free, Audacity
| | 00:52 | is an amazingly feature-packed program.
| | 00:54 | It's great for editing existing audio
as well as recording audio from scratch.
| | 00:58 | It includes multi-track capabilities,
meaning you can record one track and then go back
| | 01:02 | and record another separate track that will
play simultaneously with the original one.
| | 01:06 | But before we get into all that, we'll first
look at how to install Audacity on your Mac or PC.
| | 01:10 |
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| Downloading and installing Audacity on a Mac| 00:00 | To install Audacity on a Mac, open your web
browser and go to audacity.sourceforge.net.
| | 00:06 | In most cases, the site should automatically
detect your operating system, and you should be able
| | 00:09 | to click the Download Audacity for
Mac link right here on the front page.
| | 00:14 | If for some reason you don't see the Mac
version, or if you want to download the Windows version
| | 00:17 | to your Mac, maybe you're going to copy it
to your Windows computer that's not currently
| | 00:20 | connected to the Internet, you can click the
Download tab. And here you can click to download
| | 00:25 | the Windows version or even the Linux version.
| | 00:27 | But I'm going to stick with Mac, so
I'll click Mac over here on the left.
| | 00:31 | Now as I record this, the current
version of Audacity is Audacity 2.0.2. That could
| | 00:36 | very well have changed by the
time you're watching this video.
| | 00:38 | Being open source, you'll see
fairly frequent updates to the software.
| | 00:42 | Usually there will be bug fixes or system
tweaks, so you should still be able to follow
| | 00:45 | along with this course as
long as you are downloading a
| | 00:47 | 2.-something version of the software.
| | 00:50 | By the way, this download area is also where
you will come to download additional Plug-ins
| | 00:53 | and Libraries you might want to use later.
| | 00:55 | For example, I'll be showing you how to
download and install the LAME MP3 encoder, so you can
| | 00:59 | export audio files as MP3s directly from Audacity,
which is a capability it doesn't have on its own.
| | 01:04 | But for now I'm just going
to download the dmg file here.
| | 01:07 | Notice they also offer a zipped up version
of the software that doesn't include Help
| | 01:10 | files, and is a slightly smaller download, but
really Audacity doesn't take up very much space at all.
| | 01:15 | So unless you're using a Mac that you don't have
admin privileges on, you can go with the dmg installer.
| | 01:21 | Once the file has downloaded, I'll locate
it, and double-click it to open up the disk
| | 01:27 | image. And all I have to do here is drag
this entire Audacity folder to my Applications
| | 01:34 | folder or anywhere else, but it's generally a good
idea to keep all your apps in the Applications folder.
| | 01:39 | I have my apps folder located in my doc
here, so I will just drag it into there.
| | 01:42 | You'll see it's copied over, and now if I
look in the Applications folder, there it
| | 01:49 | is right there. And this is where you will
find the application itself, as well as several
| | 01:53 | files and folders, including the user manual,
which you'll find in the help folder, manual, and
| | 01:58 | then double-clicking the index.html file
will open the manual in your browser.
| | 02:02 | But you can also get to this help file
from directly within Audacity's Help menu.
| | 02:07 | Again, you won't have the manual included if
you downloaded the zip version of the installer.
| | 02:13 | Now since I'm going to be using this app a
lot, I'm going to drag Audacity to my Dock.
| | 02:21 | And now that Audacity is installed, I can
eject the disk image, and I can start using
| | 02:28 | Audacity right away.
| | 02:29 |
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| Downloading and installing Audacity on Windows| 00:00 | To install Audacity on a Windows PC, open up your
web browser and go to audacity.sourceforge.net.
| | 00:05 | In most cases, their site should
automatically detect your operating system and you should
| | 00:10 | be able to click the Download Audacity for
Windows link right here on the front page.
| | 00:14 | If for some reason you don't see the
Windows version, or if you want to download the Mac
| | 00:17 | version, maybe you're going to copy it to
your Mac that is not currently connected to
| | 00:19 | the Internet, you can click the Download
tab. And here you can click Audacity for Mac or
| | 00:24 | even download the Linux version.
| | 00:26 | But I'm going to stick with the Windows
version here, so I'll click Windows on the left.
| | 00:30 | Now as I recorded this, the current
version of Audacity is Audacity 2.0.2, that could
| | 00:35 | very well have changed by the
time you're watching this video.
| | 00:37 | Being open source, you'll see
fairly frequent updates to the software.
| | 00:41 | Usually there'll be bug fixes or system tweaks,
so you should still be able to follow along with
| | 00:45 | this course as long you're downloading a
| | 00:46 | 2.-something version of the software.
| | 00:48 | By the way, this download area is also you'll
come to download additional Plug-ins and Libraries
| | 00:53 | you might want later.
| | 00:54 | For example, I'll be showing how to download
and install the LAME MP3 encoder, so you can
| | 00:58 | export your audio files as MP3s directly from
Audacity, which is a capability it doesn't have on its own.
| | 01:03 | For now I'm going to download the Audacity
installer. Notice this is an.exe file. They
| | 01:07 | also give you a zipped up version of the software that
doesn't include Help files and is a slightly smaller download.
| | 01:13 | But really, Audacity doesn't take up very
much space at all, so unless you're using a PC
| | 01:17 | you don't have admin privileges on,
you can go with the exe installer.
| | 01:20 | I'll just download this to my Desktop, and
once the file is downloaded, I'll locate it
| | 01:29 | and double-click to run the installer.
| | 01:31 | If you see a security warning like this one,
you can just click Run, and this will take
| | 01:35 | me to the Setup Wizard, which walks me
through the installation. I'm going to be using this in
| | 01:38 | English, I'll leave the default
installation location, and yes, I will create a Desktop
| | 01:46 | icon so I can get Audacity
easily, and I'll click Install.
| | 01:50 | Okay, the install is done.
| | 01:52 | I'll just click Next, and I'm going to uncheck
Launch Audacity for now, and I'll click Finish.
| | 01:57 | Now at this point you can trash the installer
if you want to, and now on my Desktop I have
| | 02:02 | shortcut that I can double-click
to open Audacity.
| | 02:04 |
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| Importing audio| 00:00 | One of the most common tasks you'll likely
perform in Audacity is to edit existing audio.
| | 00:05 | Maybe you need to trim down the lecture you
recorded or maybe you want to use just a clip
| | 00:08 | from a song to place in a
project you're working on.
| | 00:11 | Whatever the case, importing existing
audio into Audacity is really simple.
| | 00:15 | Audacity can open many of the most common
file formats including WAV, AIF, MP3, and so on.
| | 00:20 | There are couples of
different ways to import audio.
| | 00:22 | I've copied the Chapter 1 folder to my
desktop so I have some files to work with. If you
| | 00:26 | don't have the Exercise Files you can use any
audio files you might have lying around your computer.
| | 00:30 | So in both the Mac and Windows versions
you can go to the File menu and choose either
| | 00:35 | Open or Import > Audio.
| | 00:38 | Both are going to do pretty much the same
thing, although you only see the Import option
| | 00:42 | if you already have a
project window open like I do here.
| | 00:44 | And choosing Import always places that file into your
existing project rather than opening it on its own.
| | 00:50 | To open a file you can also use the
keyboard command of Command+O on the Mac or Ctrl+O
| | 00:53 | on Windows, which saves you
having to move your mouse to the menu.
| | 00:56 | So I'll select Open and in this case I'll
navigate out to my Desktop and I'm going to
| | 01:00 | grab interview_mono.
| | 01:01 | Now this is a WAV file, and because I'm opening
an uncompressed, file I see this message telling
| | 01:07 | me I have the option to either copy this
file into my existing project, which makes it part
| | 01:11 | of the project and leaves the original file
untouched on my desktop, or I can just use
| | 01:15 | the file on my desktop
without making a copy of it first.
| | 01:18 | The copy is considered safer because it
leaves the original file as is in case you need to
| | 01:21 | go back to it at some point.
| | 01:23 | The Read files option is faster because
Audacity doesn't have to generate a copy of the file.
| | 01:27 | But in this case it's a very short clip
and it won't take a lot of time to copy.
| | 01:31 | So I'll leave the default of Make
a copy of the files before editing.
| | 01:34 | I can also check, Don't warn again and
always use my choice above, if I don't want to see
| | 01:37 | this message each time.
| | 01:38 | I'll leave that unchecked for now and click OK.
| | 01:42 | And now I see my audio file in my project.
| | 01:44 | Before I talk more about that,
let's take a quick look at preferences.
| | 01:46 | I'll go to Audacity > Preferences, on
Windows you'll go to Edit > Preferences, and I just
| | 01:52 | want to point out here that under Import/Export
is where you'll find the option to change
| | 01:56 | your default preferences on whether Audacity
copies the files you import or uses the originals.
| | 02:00 | So you can see here the section When importing
audio files, we'll find the same options that
| | 02:05 | we just saw on that dialog box.
| | 02:06 | So again, Make a copy of uncompressed audio
files before editing (safer) is selected by
| | 02:10 | default, and I'll just
leave it like that and click OK.
| | 02:12 | All right. So that's one way to get existing
audio files into Audacity so you can work with them.
| | 02:17 | Another way that works on both Macs and
Windows is to drag the audio file into an existing
| | 02:21 | project window, it could be a project that
already has audio or just an empty window.
| | 02:25 | So in this case I'll drag interview_
stereo.wav into my existing project.
| | 02:30 | Again, I'm presented with my options
for import and I'll leave them as is.
| | 02:34 | But this same I'll say not
to show this window again,
| | 02:37 | since now I know where the option in
preferences is if I ever need to change it.
| | 02:42 | So now I have two audio tracks in my project.
| | 02:45 | It may look like three tracks at
first, but one of these is in stereo.
| | 02:50 | I'll talk more about that in a bit.
| | 02:51 | Now on a Mac you can also drag audio files
directly to Audacity's icon in the dock and
| | 02:56 | that will always open the
file in its own project.
| | 02:59 | Let's switch over to Windows for a minute.
| | 03:01 | In Windows you can drag files
directly into an open project window.
| | 03:04 | Notice I get the same options
here, say, Don't warn again.
| | 03:11 | You can also drag a file directly to the
Taskbar if Audacity is currently running, that will
| | 03:17 | pop the window to the front and
then I can drag my file in there.
| | 03:20 | You can also drag your file to the desktop
shortcut if you have one, and that will work
| | 03:24 | whether Audacity is running or not, and you can see
it opened the file in its own window in that case.
| | 03:28 | So that's how to import audio into Audacity.
| | 03:30 | Next we'll look at how to examine
and play the audio you've imported.
| | 03:33 |
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| Playing audio| 00:00 | Previously, I imported two
tracks into an Audacity project.
| | 00:03 | Let's take a few minutes here to look more
closely at these tracks and see how to play them back.
| | 00:07 | When you import audio into
Audacity it shows up as a waveform.
| | 00:10 | These jagged lines of peaks
and valleys make up the waveform.
| | 00:14 | It's a visual representation of sound waves
where time is represented horizontally from
| | 00:17 | left to right and the loudness of a sound
is represented vertically, so the louder the
| | 00:21 | sound the taller the waveform.
| | 00:24 | Being able to see the recording's waveform
is essential to the audio editing process.
| | 00:27 | Pretty much all audio editing applications
represent audio this way, so if you ever switch
| | 00:31 | from Audacity to another audio editing
program you shouldn't have much trouble making the
| | 00:35 | adjustment, at least in terms of
being able to recognize waveform patterns.
| | 00:39 | Now again we have two
tracks in this current project.
| | 00:41 | They're both actually the same file but
the one on the top is a mono file and the one
| | 00:45 | on the bottom is in stereo.
| | 00:46 | In stereo we can have separate audio in the
left and right channels, in mono there's only
| | 00:50 | a single channel and you hear the
identical audio in both the left and right sides.
| | 00:54 | But in this case our stereo track is the
same on both sides and you can kind of tell that
| | 00:58 | just by looking at the
waveforms. Notice they look identical.
| | 01:00 | I'm going to mute the stereo track. That
silences it, so we'll just hear the mono track version.
| | 01:05 | Now I'm going to play a
few seconds of this track.
| | 01:07 | To do so I can click the Play button here
in the Playback Control area, but a keyboard
| | 01:11 | command you should get
used to using is the Spacebar.
| | 01:14 | In just about all audio editing applications
the Spacebar starts and stops playback, and
| | 01:19 | as this plays keep an eye on the waveform,
you'll see the playhead start moving across
| | 01:22 | the waveform and you should start getting a sense of
how the peaks and valleys represent the audio levels.
| | 01:27 | So I'll press the Spacebar --
| | 01:28 | (audio playing)
| | 01:45 | So you should be able to see, during the speaker's
pauses, the waveform looks kind of like a straight
| | 01:49 | line, and when he's speaking
the waveform spikes much more.
| | 01:52 | You can discern the parts of the audio where
he's speaking with more emphasis just by seeing
| | 01:55 | where the waveforms are taller,
like this area right here.
| | 01:58 | Now Audacity has several tools for working
with waveforms. The default tool is the Selection
| | 02:03 | Tool, it looks like the I-beam cursor you
see in word processing programs, and you can
| | 02:06 | see that's the cursor I have right now.
| | 02:08 | It allows you to select specific sections of
the waveform just by clicking and dragging,
| | 02:12 | just like you would in a
word processing program.
| | 02:14 | When you make a selection and press Play you'll
only hear the part of the audio that you've selected.
| | 02:20 | (audio playing)
| | 02:25 | So only what I selected was played back.
| | 02:27 | This can really be useful when you need to
focus on editing a specific portion of your audio.
| | 02:31 | You can also make adjustments to your selection.
By holding down Shift you can add to or remove
| | 02:35 | from your selection, by clicking outside the selection
to add more, or inside the selection to trim some away.
| | 02:41 | Alternately, you can place the mouse cursor
at either end of the selection, and you don't
| | 02:45 | have to hold any keyboard command for this,
you'll see a little pointing finger appear
| | 02:48 | and you can drag in or out to
make your adjustments that way.
| | 02:52 | Another reason for making selections
is to remove portions of your audio.
| | 02:55 | So for example, and we'll get in the much
more detail with this later, if I wanted to
| | 02:58 | trim off the end of this recording where we
have a cut off sentence, let me just click
| | 03:02 | here and play back for you.
| | 03:04 | (audio playing)
| | 03:05 | So it's just kind of cuts off abruptly there.
| | 03:08 | One way to get rid of that is to select
that portion of the waveform and then just hit
| | 03:11 | the Delete key on my keyboard, and now it's gone.
| | 03:14 | (audio playing)
| | 03:16 | You can just see it stops there.
| | 03:18 | Now another tool you'll
frequently use is the Zoom Tool.
| | 03:22 | This lets you click to zoom in on
a specific section of the waveform.
| | 03:28 | By zooming in you can do incredibly precise
editing like removing a loud breath before
| | 03:31 | sentence or even chopping out individual words
and reorganizing them into a different order.
| | 03:35 | We can actually zoom all
the way into the sample level.
| | 03:40 | These dots you're seeing are the individual
samples but you'll rarely work that zoomed in.
| | 03:44 | Now to zoom back out you can hold the Shift
key while clicking, or to get back to the view
| | 03:50 | where the entire waveform fits within your
window, you can click the Fit Project button.
| | 03:56 | That sets your view so that the longest
track in the project can be seen in its entirety.
| | 03:59 | Now the longest track is the stereo track
right now because I trimmed off a little bit
| | 04:02 | of the mono track here.
| | 04:03 | So when I click Fit Project it fit the
entire stereo track within the width of my window.
| | 04:07 | Now to the left of that is the Fit Selection
button, so if I grab the Selection Tool again
| | 04:13 | and just make a selection, the Fit Selection
button zooms in, so the section of the waveform
| | 04:18 | I selected fits the entire width of the window.
| | 04:20 | I'll click Fit Project again.
| | 04:21 | You'll also find the Zoom In and Zoom Out
buttons here as well and you can click those
| | 04:26 | in case you don't want to
grab the Zoom Tool itself.
| | 04:28 | Additionally, you'll find that if you move your
cursor over this area to the left of the waveform
| | 04:31 | it becomes a magnifying glass, and you can
zoom in to the waveform vertically to get
| | 04:36 | a better look at it.
| | 04:37 | And I can actually drag this down a little bit, and
let me zoom back out again by holding down Shift.
| | 04:44 | I'm going to click on the zero to keep the
waveform centered, but you can see I can zoom
| | 04:48 | into it vertically this way.
| | 04:50 | You might want to do this when you're working
with particularly quiet audio with small waveforms.
| | 04:54 | Again, hold down the Shift
key to start zooming back out.
| | 04:57 | Okay, before we wrap up here I want to point out a
couple of important things about the playback controls.
| | 05:02 | I've already mentioned that you use the
Spacebar to start and stop playback, and let me just
| | 05:06 | click out of there to deselect.
| | 05:07 | You can see where my cursor is,
I'll press the Spacebar --
| | 05:09 | (audio playing)
| | 05:12 | I'll press it again.
| | 05:14 | So using the Spacebar is the equivalent of
clicking the Play and Stop buttons that you see up here.
| | 05:19 | Notice that it always takes the playhead,
again this vertical line, back to where it
| | 05:22 | was when you started playing the file.
| | 05:24 | This can be convenient if you want
to review a section multiple times.
| | 05:27 | You can press the Spacebar--
| | 05:28 | (audio playing)
| | 05:29 | -- play a little. Press the Spacebar again to send the
playhead back to the beginning, and then press it again
| | 05:33 | to play from the same spot.
| | 05:35 | Although for those times when you need to
listen repeatedly to a section, it's easier
| | 05:38 | to make your selection and press Shift+Spacebar.
| | 05:44 | (audio playing)
| | 05:50 | So that will keep the selection
playing until you press the Spacebar again.
| | 05:53 | Now if you actually wanted to stop the
playhead where it is without making it jump back, you
| | 05:57 | want to either click the Pause
button or use the keyboard command of P.
| | 06:01 | It's important to learn the difference between
Spacebar and P, because it can be frustrating
| | 06:05 | to have the playhead jump back to the beginning when
all you wanted to do is pause the playback for a moment.
| | 06:09 | So if I press the Spacebar and start playing--
| | 06:10 | (audio playing)
| | 06:11 | -- And I just want to pause it, I can just
hit P, and you can see it's just sort of locked
| | 06:15 | into place right now. I press P again --
| | 06:17 | (audio playing)
| | 06:19 | -- And it continues playing.
| | 06:20 | (audio playing)
| | 06:21 | I press the Spacebar and it jumps
back to the point where it started.
| | 06:24 | Now we also have the buttons to jump to the
beginning or to the end of the Project, and lastly we
| | 06:29 | have the Record button for
recording directly into Audacity.
| | 06:32 | We'll talk more about that
in the chapter on recording.
| | 06:34 | Incidentally, if you have the screen real
estate to spare you can configure the Audacity
| | 06:38 | interface to your liking by dragging any
of these toolbars out of the area at the top
| | 06:42 | and moving them into their own spaces.
| | 06:44 | Now with some of these panels
you can actually reconfigure them.
| | 06:46 | For example, if I resize this Level Meter
into a more vertical configuration you can
| | 06:50 | see the meters become vertical.
| | 06:51 | So maybe I just want to adjust my Audacity
workspace so it looks something like this.
| | 06:58 | And the toolbars should stay where you
place them from project to project, so you don't
| | 07:04 | have to reconfigure the
interface each time to your liking.
| | 07:07 | Now if you totally mess up the arrangement
of the toolbars, simply go back to the View
| | 07:11 | menu, select Toolbars, and choose Reset Toolbars, and
that will place everything back to its default location.
| | 07:18 | Now we'll continue to take a look at more of
the tools and interface elements we haven't
| | 07:21 | covered yet as we go along, but for now what
we've looked at here is enough to get us started.
| | 07:25 |
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2. RecordingSetting up your hardware| 00:00 | So in this chapter we're looking at how to
record with Audacity, but before you can do
| | 00:04 | so, you have to be familiar with your computer's input
capabilities and how to route the inputs into Audacity.
| | 00:10 | These days nearly all computers, especially all
desktop computers, have ports for audio input and output.
| | 00:15 | On PCs, you'll usually find an audio input
port, an audio output port, and a microphone port.
| | 00:20 | In most cases the input port is blue, the
output port is green, and the mic port is pink.
| | 00:25 | On Macs such as the Mac Pro, the iMac, and the Mac
Mini, you'll find input and output ports as well.
| | 00:30 | The input port in this case has the symbol
with the two triangles pointing towards each
| | 00:33 | other, and the output port has a speaker icon.
| | 00:36 | Depending on what type of device you need
to hook up to your computer, you're going
| | 00:39 | to need a variety of adapters.
| | 00:41 | There are many different types of cables for
connecting things like microphones, guitars,
| | 00:45 | keyboards; maybe you want to
convert old vinyl records to MP3s.
| | 00:48 | You'll need to figure out how to
connect your device to your computer.
| | 00:50 | But personally, my recommendation is to not
use the audio input ports of your computer
| | 00:54 | at all if you can help it.
| | 00:56 | Instead consider
purchasing a USB audio input device.
| | 00:59 | A USB device will give you a cleaner digital
signal, as opposed to the analog sound, the
| | 01:03 | input ports on most computers will give you.
| | 01:05 | A device like this, and this particular one
we're looking at is the Fast Track audio input
| | 01:09 | device from M-Audio, contains ports that allow
you to connect standard microphones and instrument
| | 01:14 | cables without the need for additional
adapters, and then the whole things plugs into your
| | 01:18 | computer via a USB cable,
which all computers have.
| | 01:21 | Now even if you only want to record basic
voiceover audio with a microphone, you might
| | 01:24 | want to consider a simple USB headset mic
like the one on the right here from Logitech.
| | 01:28 | Or if you're converting old records, you'll
find it easier to connect a USB-based turntable,
| | 01:32 | rather than string together a series of cables to
connect a traditional turntable to your computer.
| | 01:37 | The point is, using a USB-based device is
going to sound better, and you'll be able to use
| | 01:40 | it with any computer, since all computers have USB
ports, but not all of them have audio input ports.
| | 01:45 | All right, so the first step is figuring
out what types of inputs your computer accepts
| | 01:48 | and what devices you want to record sounds with.
| | 01:50 | Next, you have to figure out how to
get those sounds routed into Audacity.
| | 01:54 | For this example, I have the M-Audio
Fast Track connected my Mac via a USB cable.
| | 01:59 | I've already opened Audacity and by
default it's opened a new blank project.
| | 02:02 | We'll talk about setting up a project shortly but for
now I want to focus on getting audio into the program.
| | 02:06 | So I'm going to choose Audacity > Preferences, if
you're on Windows you'll go to Edit > Preferences,
| | 02:12 | and here under the Devices category
you'll find the Recording section.
| | 02:15 | And this is where you can select
your devices from the Device menu.
| | 02:18 | Audacity should recognize any devices
you have connected to your computer.
| | 02:22 | So what you see here on my screen won't
necessarily match what you see on your own computer.
| | 02:25 | In this case I'll select the Fast Track, but you
would select whatever device you're recording through.
| | 02:29 | If you were using your computer's built-in audio
inputs for example, you'd select them from here as well.
| | 02:35 | If you have a stereo device you can choose
whether you're going to be recording just
| | 02:37 | one channel in Mono or
both channels in Stereo.
| | 02:40 | And while you're in here, you may
also want to set up the playback options.
| | 02:42 | In some cases, the device you're using may
have its own headphone jack that you can use
| | 02:46 | to listen the playback through, or you may
just want to use your computer's built-in speakers.
| | 02:51 | It's entirely up to you, but this is where
you determine where the sounds from Audacity
| | 02:54 | will be played through so you can hear them.
| | 02:56 | So if I had headphones connected to my Fast
Track I could select that, but I'm just going
| | 02:59 | to keep the default setting of
my computers Built-in Line Output.
| | 03:02 | And just click OK when you're done.
| | 03:04 | You can test your input and check your levels by
clicking once in the input level meter right up here.
| | 03:09 | I have a microphone connected to my
Fast Track and I will speak into it.
| | 03:12 | "Hey this is me testing the
levels of the microphone".
| | 03:15 | You can see the level moving here in
the level meter of the Mixer toolbar.
| | 03:19 | Now we are only seeing the left channel,
because I'm using a Mono microphone.
| | 03:22 | If I were recording into a Stereo device, you'd
see both the left and the right channels moving.
| | 03:26 | When checking your levels, you want to
make sure that they don't hit the far right of
| | 03:29 | the meter, which usually means your
audio is going to be distorted or blown out.
| | 03:33 | Now depending on the input device you're using,
you may or not be able to adjust the levels
| | 03:37 | from here in Audacity.
| | 03:38 | With the Fast Track, it has its own input level
dial, it's a physical dial on the device itself
| | 03:42 | that I can turn to adjust how
much signal is going into the computer.
| | 03:45 | So if I turn this down a little bit, you'll
see that the levels starts going down, and
| | 03:49 | if I turn the dial up, it will
start going up as I continue talking.
| | 03:52 | And again, I want to make sure I don't make
it too loud, so I'm just going to pull that
| | 03:55 | back just a little bit more.
| | 03:57 | If the device you're using doesn't have its
own level dial, you can use the Input level
| | 04:00 | slider here on the right.
| | 04:01 | Dragging that left and right will
allow you to move that up and down as well.
| | 04:05 | You may find that it's grayed out in some cases
too, depending on which device you have selected.
| | 04:09 | And you can actually switch the device
you're working with at any time using the menu here,
| | 04:12 | you don't actually have to go into Preferences.
| | 04:14 | So if I want to switch to my Built-in Line
Input, I can select that, and now if I click
| | 04:18 | up here again, you'll see I'm getting stereo,
because I'm recording this in a stereo device.
| | 04:22 | I can switch that to Mono here if I wanted
to, but I'm going to keep that in Stereo,
| | 04:27 | click again to turn that back on.
| | 04:28 | I'm going to continue dragging that down a
little bit, and those are probably good levels
| | 04:33 | for me right there, and you can click in the
meter to turn them back off if you don't want
| | 04:36 | to see them moving the entire time.
| | 04:37 | And again, we'll get more into setting levels
and recording very shortly, but for now, that's
| | 04:41 | how you get audio into Audacity.
| | 04:43 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a new project| 00:00 | Whenever you open Audacity, it
automatically opens a new blank project window for you.
| | 00:04 | A project is where you create, import or
edit your audio files. A project can be a single
| | 00:09 | track or it can contain multiple
tracks that play simultaneously.
| | 00:13 | But the project doesn't just contain your
audio files, it also stores information about
| | 00:16 | what you've done to those files, such as
their pan position in the stereo mix, their volume
| | 00:21 | level or gain, the names you've given your
tracks, and several other pieces of data.
| | 00:25 | So let's take a look at
how to setup a new project.
| | 00:26 | Let me just close this window and start fresh,
let's go to File > New, and that creates a new
| | 00:33 | blank project for you, but of course you
need to know a little bit more than that.
| | 00:37 | Let's go into Audacity's Preferences. If
you're in Windows you go to Edit > Preferences.
| | 00:42 | Here select the Quality category. And what I
want to look at here is the Sampling area.
| | 00:46 | Notice here you can select the Default Sample
Rate and the Default Sample Format. Together
| | 00:50 | these settings affect the
quality of your projects.
| | 00:53 | Now I need to get a little bit technical here, but this
is important stuff to understand, so bear with me.
| | 00:58 | So let's start by talking about Sample Rate.
| | 01:00 | Sound is a continuous entity or wave.
| | 01:03 | When we capture audio digitally, which is
what we're doing when we record into a computer,
| | 01:06 | we're not capturing every
single moment of the sound.
| | 01:09 | What we're doing is capturing samples of the
sound. Just as a video camera doesn't capture
| | 01:13 | every single moment of motion, it captures
frames, but it captures enough frames per
| | 01:17 | second, generally 24 to 30 frames per second,
that when those images are played in sequence
| | 01:22 | we have the illusion of motion.
| | 01:24 | So when you digitally record a sound,
the frames in this case are called samples.
| | 01:28 | The more samples you can collect per second, the more
accurate the sound will sound when you play it back.
| | 01:33 | The speed at which these samples are
collected is called the Sample Rate.
| | 01:37 | For example, the sample rate of a standard
music CD is 41,100 Hz or 44.1 kHz. That means
| | 01:44 | that for every second of music what you're
really hearing is 41,100 samples of the music,
| | 01:49 | which is acceptable to the majority
of people in terms of sound fidelity.
| | 01:53 | So in Audacity the default sample rate is 441, but
you can see there is a wide range of choices here.
| | 01:59 | Generally though you're going to stick
with 441 or possibly 48,000 Hz, and that's the
| | 02:03 | sample rate commonly used for
audio that accompanies video.
| | 02:06 | Bear in mind that the higher the sample
rate, the larger your files are going to be.
| | 02:09 | If you have the hard drive space to spare,
some people recommend going as high as 96,000
| | 02:13 | Hz, but most people can't really hear
the difference between 441, 48 and 96 kHz.
| | 02:19 | So, unless you're producing audio for some
real audiophiles, I'd say stick with the default
| | 02:24 | of 441, but now you know where to
change this default if you need to.
| | 02:27 | Now the other setting here
is the Default Sample Rate.
| | 02:29 | This is also commonly called the Bit Depth.
| | 02:32 | Notice we have the choices here
of 16 bit, 24 bit, and 32-bit float.
| | 02:36 | The bit depth determines the
dynamic range of your audio file.
| | 02:39 | The more bits, the wider the range of volume
you can have within each sample of your recording.
| | 02:44 | So I just compared the sample rate to a camera
that takes thousands of images of a sound per second.
| | 02:49 | Again, for example, a sample rate of
441 kHz takes 41,100 samples per second.
| | 02:54 | The amount of information stored in each one
of those samples is determined by the bit depth.
| | 02:58 | So for example, a low bit depth like an 8-bit
resolution, really is not enough to accurately
| | 03:02 | capture the dynamic range of most sounds.
| | 03:05 | A 16-bit resolution, which is how music CDs are
encoded, allows for a much wider dynamic range.
| | 03:10 | 24 gives you an even larger range and 32 is
the best modern computers can do at this point.
| | 03:15 | So, the higher your bit depth, the more
information or dynamic range you have to work with.
| | 03:19 | Higher bit depths also result in larger files
though, but unless you're working on an old
| | 03:22 | computer with very little hard drive space
to spare, you should always work with the
| | 03:26 | highest bit depth possible,
which is 32-bit float.
| | 03:29 | When you're done, you can always come back
in here to convert the project to a lower
| | 03:31 | bit depth if you want to decrease the file
size, or for example, burn a CD, for which
| | 03:36 | you'll have to drop your bit depth down to
16-bit, but it's best to work with the highest
| | 03:39 | resolution file while editing.
| | 03:42 | Now the reason it's labeled 32-bit float
is because this isn't true 32-bit recording.
| | 03:47 | 32-bit float is actually a 24-bit resolution
recording with an additional 8-bits for headroom
| | 03:51 | and dynamic range, and currently there aren't any 32-bit
sound cards or input/output devices for computers.
| | 03:56 | The highest quality devices are still 24-bit,
and Audacity uses 32-bit float to get the
| | 04:01 | optimum sound quality and dynamic
range out of your 24-bit hardware.
| | 04:05 | Now again, this is kind of technical, but
the bottom line is, use 32-bit float for your
| | 04:09 | recordings to get the best dynamic range.
| | 04:11 | You can always convert it down later, but
you'll never be able to get more quality out
| | 04:15 | of a recording that was
recorded at a lower bit rate.
| | 04:18 | So after all this, in actuality, the default
settings in Audition are going to be the best
| | 04:21 | settings in most cases, unless you're
working on a project that specifically needs to be
| | 04:25 | at a higher sample rate. I'll click OK.
| | 04:29 | Now you can also set the Sample Rate of your
current project from this menu down here in
| | 04:32 | the lower left-hand corner.
| | 04:34 | That will only affect the current project
and any new project you create will still
| | 04:38 | use the default settings and preferences.
| | 04:40 | Also, changing the sample rate here won't
have any effect on tracks you've already recorded
| | 04:44 | or have imported, but it will apply to the
files you export from that point out. I'm going
| | 04:48 | to leave that at 441 for now though.
| | 04:50 | Okay, so really, creating a new project in
Audacity is very easy, but I felt that it
| | 04:54 | was important to know what's
going on behind the scenes.
| | 04:56 | Now before we wrap up this movie, I want to look at
one more thing, and that's how Audacity saves projects.
| | 05:01 | Now I can't choose File > Save right now, notice
Save Project is grayed out, because I haven't
| | 05:05 | recorded or imported anything yet, so I'm
just going to click Record and record a few
| | 05:09 | seconds just to create a track.
| | 05:13 | Okay, so now I can choose File > Save Project.
| | 05:18 | Now I get this warning telling me that
choosing Save Project creates a file that can only
| | 05:21 | be read by Audacity, and that if I want to
save my audio file as a file that can be
| | 05:24 | read by other programs,
to use the export Command.
| | 05:27 | But when you're working in Audacity you really
should save your work as a project, otherwise
| | 05:30 | you can't save information like the number
of tracks you're using, the position of the
| | 05:34 | tracks in the mix, the volume
levels, and pan information, and so on.
| | 05:37 | I will choose not to see
this warning again and click OK.
| | 05:42 | Now I'm going to navigate out to my
Desktop, and before I do this, I'm going to create
| | 05:45 | a new folder to store my project in. Let's
just call it My First Recording. And then I'll
| | 05:55 | name the project itself, My First Project.
| | 06:00 | Notice the format is set to .aup, which is
an Audacity project file format, that's the
| | 06:04 | only one that's available
here, and I'll click Save.
| | 06:07 | Now there is a reason I created a folder
to save this into. Let's hide Audacity for a
| | 06:10 | moment and look in this folder
that I just created on my Desktop.
| | 06:18 | Notice there are two items in here, the first
one, My First Project.aup, is the actual project
| | 06:22 | file, and there is also folder
called My First Project_data.
| | 06:25 | The data file contains, among other things,
the sound files that make up your project.
| | 06:30 | These two items here are intrinsically tied
together, so it's very important to make sure
| | 06:34 | you never move these items away from each other,
they should always remain in the same directory.
| | 06:39 | That's why I suggest storing your project
in sort of a master folder like I have done
| | 06:42 | here, so that the project file and
its data folder are organized together.
| | 06:45 | The only thing you ever want to do in here
is to double-click the project file when you
| | 06:48 | want to open the project.
| | 06:50 | You don't want to move these files around,
you don't want to go into data folder and
| | 06:53 | move anything around in there.
Don't rename any of these items either.
| | 06:57 | If you want to rename your project, you want
to open it up in Audacity, in this case it's
| | 07:01 | telling me it's already open, and then
choose File > Save Project As, to create new copy of
| | 07:05 | the project with a new name.
| | 07:07 | Not following these rules can lead to some
serious problems with your project, and really,
| | 07:10 | the only rule is don't mess with
anything in the project folder.
| | 07:14 | Now one last thing related to
the project file I should mention.
| | 07:16 | In the previous chapter when I showed you
how to import audio, we saw that you can choose
| | 07:20 | whether to make a copy of that file into your
project or to read and use the file directly
| | 07:24 | from its current location, and again, we
saw those preferences under import and export
| | 07:29 | and I used the default setting to make a copy
of uncompressed audio files before editing.
| | 07:33 | But if you choose to read the file from its
current location, you should never move or
| | 07:36 | rename that file unless you first
copy it into the Audacity project.
| | 07:40 | Okay, so this might seem like an awful lot
of stuff to remember just to create and manage
| | 07:45 | an Audacity project, but most of what I've
covered here is behind the scenes stuff. At
| | 07:49 | its most basic, creating a new project is
just about choosing File > New. You can adjust
| | 07:53 | the sample rate and bit depth if necessary
and then just name and save your project.
| | 07:57 | And just remember not to fiddle with any
of the project files outside of Audacity.
| | 08:00 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Recording| 00:00 | Now, let's take a look at the
actual process of recording.
| | 00:03 | I still have the project I created in the
previous movie open, and it contains this small
| | 00:06 | clip of audio I recorded.
| | 00:08 | I'm just going to click the X
button here on the track to delete it.
| | 00:11 | For this exercise I'm going to pretend that
I'm recording an intro voiceover for a podcast.
| | 00:15 | I'll start by making sure my input levels
are set correctly, and that my levels are okay.
| | 00:19 | Now, we've already taken
a look at how to do this.
| | 00:21 | But, as a review, I'll click the Input Device
menu here in the toolbar, and I want to make
| | 00:25 | sure the device I want to use is selected.
| | 00:28 | For this example, I'll use the
Built-in Line Input on my Mac.
| | 00:31 | But again, just make sure you select whatever
device you're using, whether it's your computer's
| | 00:34 | built-in audio input or some
USB device you have connected.
| | 00:40 | And for this recording, I think I'm just going
to record in Mono, so I don't have two channels.
| | 00:43 | It's just going to be a simple voice recording.
| | 00:45 | Next, I'll click the input
level meters to check my levels.
| | 00:49 | When checking your levels, you want to make
sure to speak, if you're going to be recording
| | 00:52 | speech, at the same level you plan on
speaking when you hit the Record button.
| | 00:56 | If you're going to be playing an instrument
or capturing some other kind of sound, just
| | 00:59 | make sure it's coming in at the same
level it will be when you record it.
| | 01:02 | Since I'm using my Built-In Line In, I can use
the Input Level Slider here on the right-hand side.
| | 01:06 | If this slider is grayed out for you, most
likely, the device you're using has its own
| | 01:10 | input level dial, so you want to
use that to adjust your levels.
| | 01:13 | If you're new to adjusting levels, or if you
just want more precise information, you may
| | 01:17 | want to drag the meters
out into their own panel.
| | 01:19 | This way, I can expand the panel
and see more increments on the meter.
| | 01:24 | I could even configure it vertically like so.
| | 01:28 | Now ideally, you want to set your levels so
that at their loudest, they should come
| | 01:31 | right about to the -6db level here.
| | 01:34 | That should give you a signal that's loud
enough but with enough headroom that your
| | 01:37 | audio doesn't get distorted
if it gets a little louder.
| | 01:40 | And it's better to have audio
that's a little on the quieter side.
| | 01:44 | You can always bring the level up in Audacity,
but there's no way to fix blown-out audio
| | 01:47 | if it's been recorded that way.
| | 01:49 | So, looking at this right now as I'm
speaking, I can see this is getting way too loud.
| | 01:52 | In fact, you're seeing this little red line
here, which is indicating that I'm probably
| | 01:55 | clipping this signal.
| | 01:56 | I'm just going to click that to get rid of that.
| | 01:59 | I'm going to continue talking in my
regular speaking voice, and I'm going to move the
| | 02:03 | input volume down a little bit, so I can get
that level right to about 6db at its loudest,
| | 02:09 | so I will just say a little bit more
and right about there is probably good.
| | 02:12 | Once that's set, I'm going to go back to the
View Menu here and choose Toolbars > Reset Toolbars
| | 02:17 | to place the level meter
back in its original location.
| | 02:19 | Now, it's not a bad idea to also do a quick test
recording before you commit to the actual recording.
| | 02:25 | This gives you an opportunity to check for
any problems before you do a longer recording,
| | 02:29 | and there will be less risk of you
hitting Stop only to find a problem and having to
| | 02:32 | redo the whole recording, or worse, having missed
the opportunity to capture a one-time recording.
| | 02:37 | So I'm going to click Record
and just record a few seconds.
| | 02:40 | Hi! This is Garrick Chow and this is the
lynda.com Video Training Podcast, Episode 105.
| | 02:48 | Okay, so there's my recording, and you could see
the waveform was appearing as I was recording.
| | 02:52 | And this is a decent looking waveform.
| | 02:54 | Basically, what you're striving for is
enough level so you have these peaks and valleys.
| | 02:58 | What you don't want is a waveform
that looks like tiny little bumps.
| | 03:01 | You want these dramatic spikes to cover a
good range of vertical distance on the clip.
| | 03:05 | Now, on the flip side, you don't want the
waveforms to be so large that they're completely
| | 03:09 | or even partially cut off.
| | 03:10 | Let me show you an example of what I mean.
| | 03:12 | I'm going to use a filter
to amplify this recording.
| | 03:16 | So, I'm going to bump this up by maybe 15db.
| | 03:20 | I'm going to allow for clipping, and
we'll see what this looks like. Okay.
| | 03:24 | So, see this is a bad looking waveform.
| | 03:26 | Anytime you have parts cut off or clipped, you
immediately know that your levels are too high.
| | 03:31 | So, instead of the points I had on the
waveform before, they're just basically cut
| | 03:35 | off at the top and bottom now.
| | 03:36 | So even just looking at this, I can tell this
is not going to be a good sounding recording.
| | 03:40 | Of course, since this is audio,
you also want to use your ears.
| | 03:43 | Let's see what this sounds like.
| | 03:50 | (audio playing)
| | 03:53 | So, it's really not that hard
to hear how bad that sounds.
| | 03:57 | When you hear that sort of distortion,
you're hearing what's called clipping.
| | 03:59 | Now, I did this clipping artificially with
that filter, but it's pretty much what you
| | 04:03 | can expect your recording to sound
like if your input levels are too high.
| | 04:06 | I'm going to undo that.
| | 04:09 | And now when I play it, it
should sound much better.
| | 04:12 | (audio playing)
| | 04:17 | So, now I have a good looking waveform that
I can work with for editing, and there's even
| | 04:22 | enough headroom that I could bump up the
level a bit with that filter if I wanted to.
| | 04:25 | So, once you're happy with your levels,
you can do the actual real recording.
| | 04:29 | So I'll discard this test track just by clicking the X
again and now I'll record the real intro to my podcast.
| | 04:37 | Hello, and welcome to the
lynda.com Video Training Podcast.
| | 04:39 | I am Garrick Chow, and this is Episode 105.
| | 04:43 | As usual, we have an incredibly diverse
collection of tutorials that were released this week
| | 04:48 | including courses on typography, mobile app
creation, 3D animation, forming business plans,
| | 04:54 | and advanced spreadsheet design.
| | 04:56 | We'll get to all that and more in just a moment.
| | 04:59 | But first, let's see what's been happening in
the world of digital photography this week. Okay.
| | 05:05 | So there's my first real recording in Audacity.
| | 05:07 | I'll fit that in the entire window,
and the waveform looks pretty good.
| | 05:10 | And I'll just play it back to check it.
| | 05:13 | (audio playing)
| | 05:41 | So again, it's always a good idea to go back
and check your recording when you're done recording
| | 05:44 | it to make sure there aren't any
problems that need to be fixed.
| | 05:46 | So, everything sounds and looks
pretty good at this point to me.
| | 05:49 | Now, I definitely heard some things that
can be fixed or tightened up, but we'll handle
| | 05:53 | that when we get to editing.
| | 05:54 | But for now, I'm pretty
satisfied with this first recording.
| | 05:56 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding tracks| 00:00 | When working in an Audacity project, you have
the ability to record or import multiple tracks.
| | 00:05 | This allows you to combine multiple audio
files together while being able to adjust
| | 00:09 | the volume level of each track
individually to create a mix.
| | 00:13 | In the previous movie, I recorded a
short bit of audio onto this first track.
| | 00:16 | It's the intro to a podcast I'm creating.
| | 00:18 | In fact, I'm going to click the track name
and choose Name, and I'll change this to Intro.
| | 00:25 | Now, when I click OK, you can see the
track has now been renamed to Intro.
| | 00:29 | When you're working with multiple tracks,
you'll definitely want to give your tracks
| | 00:31 | good, understandable names.
| | 00:33 | Now, to record a second track, it's simply
a matter of hitting the Record button again.
| | 00:36 | And when I do so, Audacity will automatically create
a new track and start recording from the beginning.
| | 00:41 | But, maybe what I want to record next is the first
segment of my podcast that appears after the intro.
| | 00:45 | Notice when I hit Record, it starts
at the very beginning of the project.
| | 00:50 | I can hear my previous
recording as I'm recording this track.
| | 00:53 | (audio playing)
| | 00:54 | Now, this might be the behavior that
you want if you're recording, say, music.
| | 00:58 | Maybe your first track is an instrument like a guitar,
and you want to sing a vocal over the second track.
| | 01:02 | In that case, it makes perfect sense to record
from the beginning and have the two tracks overlap.
| | 01:06 | But, in this case since these are both
speaking tracks, I don't want the overlap.
| | 01:10 | I want this next recording to
come after the first one ends.
| | 01:13 | Let me just delete that.
| | 01:14 | Now, you may be wondering at this point,
why not just record onto the same track?
| | 01:18 | And I could do so by holding down Shift when
I click Record, and you can see that's going
| | 01:22 | to create what's called an Append Record.
| | 01:24 | So I'll hold Shift and Click,
and you can see what happens.
| | 01:27 | So, you can see it's actually
recording onto the same track.
| | 01:31 | In fact, it actually adds onto the
existing clip rather than creating a new clip.
| | 01:35 | So, if I click Stop, notice
this is all one clip at this point.
| | 01:39 | And this may very well be what you want to
do if you're recording, say, a long monologue
| | 01:43 | and want it all to be one single clip.
| | 01:45 | But for my podcast, I like
having each section as its own track.
| | 01:48 | That gives me more freedom to play around
with the pacing and arrangement of the sections.
| | 01:52 | It allows me to change my mind more easily
if I decide I want the first segment of the
| | 01:56 | show to be last instead, for example.
| | 01:58 | So I'm going to undo what I just recorded.
| | 02:00 | And by the way, you have
virtually unlimited undos in Audacity.
| | 02:04 | You can always go back to a previous
edit as long as you haven't closed the file.
| | 02:08 | And just as a quick sidebar here, if you go to
View > History, you'll see a list of everything
| | 02:12 | you've done in the project so far,
and how many steps you've performed.
| | 02:16 | So I can roll back and I can see, here's where
I created a new project, I recorded some audio,
| | 02:20 | I removed that track, that was my test
track from the previous movie, I recorded audio
| | 02:24 | again, removed that, recorded, removed and so on.
| | 02:27 | You can even see where I renamed audio
track to Intro at the beginning of this movie.
| | 02:30 | So, if you wanted to go way back, instead
of hitting Undo multiple times, you can just
| | 02:34 | look for that point you want to jump back
to, for instance if I jump back to Recorded
| | 02:38 | Audio, you can see the name of the track is
changed back to what it originally was now.
| | 02:43 | It gets rid of all the things
that I did after that point.
| | 02:45 | But, I want to jump back to where I currently am,
so let's select that again and click OK.
| | 02:49 | Okay, so I'm going to click the Skip to the End button
here to move my playhead to the very end of the clip.
| | 02:55 | And now when I click Record, Audacity will
create a new track, and it will start recording
| | 03:00 | this new clip from where
the playhead currently is.
| | 03:03 | This week, Canon announced an update to
their line of PowerShot point-and-shoot cameras.
| | 03:08 | The new models feature built-in Wi-Fi, allowing
you to upload your photos to Facebook or Twitter
| | 03:12 | directly from the camera or even to share them
between other Wi-Fi-enabled PowerShot cameras.
| | 03:17 | The cameras also now shoot in full 1080p HD
video with stereo sound and allow you to zoom
| | 03:22 | while recording, a feature that
was missing in previous versions.
| | 03:26 | And you can of course upload your movies
directly to YouTube over a Wi-Fi connection.
| | 03:29 | All right! So there is my second track.
| | 03:32 | There is really nothing to it.
| | 03:33 | I'll just click the Fit Project button again,
so I can see both clips in their entirety.
| | 03:37 | And if I click a little before the end of
the first clip to place my playhead there,
| | 03:40 | I can listen to how these
two clips flow together.
| | 03:43 | (audio playing)
| | 03:51 | All right! So, I actually forgot to
delete that little bit of audio right there.
| | 03:55 | So this is where the clip
originally ended, I believe.
| | 03:58 | (audio playing)
| | 03:59 | Okay. So yeah, this is the little
recording I made as I hit Record.
| | 04:03 | So, I'm just going to select that with my
Selection Tool, and hit the Delete key on my keyboard.
| | 04:09 | This again is one of the advantages
to me of having multiple tracks here.
| | 04:13 | Now, I can select what's called the Time
Shift Tool, and this allows me to play with the
| | 04:16 | pacing between these two different clips.
| | 04:18 | I can now drag this clip over to the left,
I can line them up if I want the transition
| | 04:22 | between the two clips to be pretty tight.
| | 04:25 | We'll hear how that sounds.
| | 04:29 | (audio playing)
| | 04:35 | If I wanted to create a little bit more of
a pause in there, I could just use the Time
| | 04:38 | Shift Tool, drag it a little bit more to
the right, or if I wanted to lessen the pause,
| | 04:41 | I could have two clips
overlap a little bit like this.
| | 04:44 | So, recording additional tracks is really
just a matter of placing the playhead where
| | 04:47 | you want to start the recording
and then hitting the Record button.
| | 04:50 | Of course, your additional tracks
probably won't always be recorded from scratch.
| | 04:53 | You can import existing tracks as well.
| | 04:55 | I have copied to my desktop a music file
called music_bed.wav and I want this to act as the
| | 05:00 | background music for my intro.
| | 05:02 | Now we've already seen how to import audio
by dragging them into the Project window.
| | 05:06 | But, since my Project window is pretty much
taking up the entire space right now and I
| | 05:11 | don't want to move my window around, I'm
just going to choose File > Import > Audio.
| | 05:14 | Remember, when you choose Import, that takes
the file and places it into your current project.
| | 05:18 | So, I'll browse up to my Desktop,
there's music_bed. I'll select it.
| | 05:22 | Again, I have the option of copying the
file into my project or using it where it is.
| | 05:26 | I prefer copying the files.
| | 05:28 | That way, everything related to my project
stays in the Projects Data folder, and I don't
| | 05:31 | have to worry about having files
spread out all over my computer.
| | 05:33 | So I'll leave that selected and click OK.
| | 05:36 | So, you can see by the two
waveforms, this is a stereo file.
| | 05:40 | And we can also tell it just by looking at this
that the music is way louder than my voiceover tracks.
| | 05:44 | So, I'm going to drag its
Gain Slider down a little bit.
| | 05:48 | Let's lower the volume, and I'll play some
of this from the beginning so you can hear
| | 05:53 | what it sounds like.
| | 05:55 | (audio playing)
| | 06:12 | So, that's a multi-track recording.
| | 06:14 | And remember, if necessary, if you want to
see more of your tracks, you can adjust their
| | 06:17 | height just by placing your cursor between
the tracks or at the border of the tracks,
| | 06:23 | and adjust their appearance that way.
| | 06:24 | So, that's a multi-track recording.
| | 06:26 | Once you have a project created in Audacity, it's just
a matter of recording and importing additional tracks.
| | 06:31 | Now, we definitely need to do some editing
and mixing here, but we'll look at how to
| | 06:35 | do that in the upcoming chapters.
| | 06:36 | For now, I'm just going to make sure
to save my project and we'll move on.
| | 06:40 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Recording to two tracks simultaneously| 00:00 | In the previous movie, we looked at how to record
or import multiple tracks into a single project.
| | 00:05 | And the question that probably popped into
your head at that point is whether it's possible
| | 00:08 | to perform a simultaneous multi-track recording.
| | 00:11 | Meaning, can we record on to
more than one track at a time?
| | 00:14 | And my definitive answer is, yes, kind of.
| | 00:18 | Audacity really isn't designed
to be a multi-track recorder.
| | 00:20 | It works best for projects where you
can record or import one track at a time.
| | 00:24 | But there is a workaround I can show you if you
absolutely need to record two tracks simultaneously.
| | 00:29 | For example, maybe you're
conducting an interview with someone.
| | 00:31 | You have two microphones and you want to
make sure you can control the mix between both
| | 00:35 | you and the person you're interviewing later.
| | 00:37 | If you were both on the same track, it
would be difficult and time-consuming to do.
| | 00:40 | But, if you're both on your own tracks, you can just
use the gain sliders on the tracks to adjust the mix.
| | 00:44 | Now, in order to do this, you need to have a
stereo input device that's capable of panning
| | 00:49 | your recordings before they get into Audacity.
| | 00:51 | For example, here is a
photo of a standard mixer.
| | 00:54 | You would plug your microphone into one track,
and the second microphone into another track.
| | 00:57 | Then, you would go to each track's pan controls and
pan one hard to the left and one hard to the right.
| | 01:03 | This effectively separates the two audio
sources into the left and right stereo channels.
| | 01:07 | So, one microphone will be entirely in the left
channel, and the other one will be entirely in the right.
| | 01:12 | Then you run the output of the mixer into your
audio input device or into your computer's line in.
| | 01:16 | When you record with Audacity, you'll see how the
two sources appear in the left and right channels.
| | 01:21 | In the Exercise Files folder, I have an
example clip of music that was recorded in stereo
| | 01:24 | with a guitar and keyboard
panned to opposite sides.
| | 01:27 | Let's see what it looks like in Audacity.
| | 01:28 | I am going to go to File > Open just to
open this file that's on my desktop.
| | 01:33 | It's called keys_guitar.mp3.
| | 01:35 | It opens up in its own project window.
| | 01:38 | So you can see we have one
track, and it's in stereo.
| | 01:41 | We have two separate channels within this track.
| | 01:43 | And you should be able to tell these are two
separate recordings just by looking at their waveforms.
| | 01:46 | You can see there is a difference between the
waveform at the top, and the waveform at the bottom.
| | 01:50 | I'll just play a
little bit so you can hear it.
| | 01:53 | (music playing)
| | 01:56 | So, if you have headphones on or are listening
through stereo speakers, you should be able
| | 02:00 | to hear the guitar in the right
side, and the keyboard on the left.
| | 02:04 | If I pan, notice we only hear
the keyboards and the guitar.
| | 02:14 | (music playing)
| | 02:16 | Now, to give myself the ability to mix these
channels independently of each other, I need
| | 02:21 | to separate them into their own tracks.
| | 02:24 | This is easily done by clicking the name of the
track here, and then choosing Split Stereo Track.
| | 02:29 | And just like that, I now
I have two separate tracks.
| | 02:31 | Now, they're both still
panned to the left and right.
| | 02:34 | And you should still hear the guitar
in the right, and the keyboard on the left.
| | 02:40 | So if I mute the keyboard for example,
you only hear the guitar on the right.
| | 02:50 | (music playing)
| | 02:54 | So, if I want to hear both tracks in both
left and right speakers, I need to click on
| | 02:58 | the track name, and switch them to Mono.
| | 03:02 | You can see down here, Mono as well, and now
I should be able to hear both tracks in both
| | 03:06 | the left and right channels.
| | 03:08 | (music playing)
| | 03:12 | So, I'm getting one.
| | 03:13 | I can hear the guitar in both the left and
right sides now, and same for the keys.
| | 03:20 | (music playing)
| | 03:23 | So, that's a quick workaround on how to
record two tracks simultaneously into Audacity.
| | 03:29 | Again, Audacity really isn't designed for
this sort of recording, but at least now you
| | 03:32 | know a method for doing so with two
tracks, if that's what you need to do.
| | 03:35 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Basic EditingMaking selections| 00:00 | At this point we've seen how to record and
import audio files into an Audacity project,
| | 00:05 | but rarely will you record something that
you're 100% happy with. You may hear unwanted
| | 00:09 | sounds or maybe you flubbed a line of
dialog that you immediately restated and you need
| | 00:13 | to edit out the bad version.
| | 00:15 | If you're working with an imported audio
file you might only want to use a portion of it
| | 00:18 | in your project and discard the rest.
| | 00:20 | Whatever the case, in this chapter we'll
be going over some basic editing techniques
| | 00:24 | you will need to become proficient at in
order to mold your project into what you want.
| | 00:27 | I am going to keep working on my podcast
project that I started in the previous chapter.
| | 00:31 | If you have access to the Exercise Files, you
can open the saved version and work along with me.
| | 00:36 | The most fundamental editing concept to
understand is one that you probably already know from
| | 00:39 | working with word processors.
| | 00:40 | Just like when you want to change the font
or color or some text in a word processor
| | 00:44 | you have to first select that
text that you what to change.
| | 00:47 | When working with audio in audacity, and
pretty much all other audio editing applications for
| | 00:51 | that matter, you have to first select
the section of audio that you want edit.
| | 00:54 | I have already covered a bit of this previously,
but let's review and expand on what we've seen.
| | 00:58 | To make a selection you need the Selection Tool,
which is the default tool when you open Audacity.
| | 01:03 | Let's solo the first track.
| | 01:04 | Soloing a track mutes all the other tracks so you
don't have to hear them while working on the Solo track.
| | 01:09 | You can solo multiple tracks too.
| | 01:10 | For example, I can solo the second track
so I can hear it is well and now I just want
| | 01:14 | to hear the music track underneath.
| | 01:16 | Alternately, I could unsolo
those and just mute the music track.
| | 01:19 | It's exact same result and it's up to you
to decide whether it's more efficient to just
| | 01:23 | mute a single track or solo
several tracks. Let's listen.
| | 01:28 | (audio playing)
| | 01:58 | So again, if I want to make a change to any
part of that waveform I need to select the
| | 02:02 | part that I want to change.
| | 02:03 | For instance, maybe I made a mistake in this
week there is no coverage on 3D animation courses.
| | 02:07 | So I want to get that part
of the audio out of there.
| | 02:10 | I need to find the part of the waveform where I
say 3D animation, select it, and then delete it.
| | 02:15 | So I think it was around here.
| | 02:16 | So I am just going to
click and play back from there.
| | 02:20 | (audio playing)
| | 02:24 | So there is right there, and this is going
to be a relatively easy edit, because I have
| | 02:27 | a decent pause on either side of the phrase.
| | 02:29 | I am going to get my zoom tool just to zoom
in on that part of the wave from so we can
| | 02:32 | see it a little better, and
I'll get my Selection Tool again.
| | 02:35 | So there are a couple of
ways to make the selection.
| | 02:37 | I can just drag with the Selection Tool, and
remember, when you have a selection made, hitting
| | 02:43 | Play will only play that selection so
you can hear if you captured it all.
| | 02:47 | (audio playing)
| | 02:49 | Now if you need to adjust your selection,
you can hold Shift and click inside or outside
| | 02:54 | the selection to add or
remove from the selection.
| | 02:56 | So if I wanted it to be a little bit tighter,
I could hold down Shift on my keyboard and
| | 03:00 | click within the
selection like so, on both sides.
| | 03:03 | Or if I needed to expand that a
bit, just click on the outside.
| | 03:08 | Alternately, you can place your cursor over
the very edge of the selection until you get
| | 03:11 | this pointing finger and
then click-and-drag in or out.
| | 03:15 | That works on both sides.
| | 03:18 | Now there may be times when you may find it more
useful to create your selection while listening.
| | 03:22 | Maybe you're listening to a long stretch of
audio and you want to make sure that you
| | 03:25 | marked the beginning of the selection
point and the end while you're listening.
| | 03:28 | Audacity lets you use the left and right
bracket keys on your keyboard to mark the beginning
| | 03:32 | and end points of a selection.
| | 03:33 | I am just going to click to deselect
what I have so far, and I'm going to scroll over
| | 03:36 | a bit so we can roll back, and I'll let this
play now and when I reach the point where
| | 03:40 | I want to start the selection I'll hit the
left bracket on my keyboard, and when I reach
| | 03:43 | to the end of the selection
I'll hit the right bracket.
| | 03:47 | (audio playing)
| | 03:51 | Now you're probably not going to land exactly
at the beginning and end point you want, but
| | 03:54 | this lets you get close while listening,
and you can always readjust afterwards.
| | 03:58 | If I wanted to drag this in a
little bit more I could do so.
| | 04:03 | Now with my selection made I can hit the
Delete key and that section of audio has now been
| | 04:09 | deleted from this track.
| | 04:10 | Let's hear how it sounds now.
| | 04:13 | (audio playing)
| | 04:19 | All right, that doesn't sound too bad.
| | 04:20 | I do think the pause in here is kind of
long so I am just going to select a little bit
| | 04:24 | more in here, delete that,
and let's listen again.
| | 04:30 | (audio playing)
| | 04:34 | So that sounds much better to me.
| | 04:36 | Again, make your selection
before you make your edit.
| | 04:39 | Now you can select across tracks, so if you
wanted to remove or edit an entire selection
| | 04:43 | of your project, just click-and-drag down
through all the tracks you want to alter with
| | 04:46 | the Selection Tool.
| | 04:48 | Now one annoyance I have with this behavior
is that once your cursor touches a track, you
| | 04:52 | can't drag back up to deselect that track.
| | 04:56 | So if I really only wanted to select the first
two tracks, but I accidentally touched the third
| | 04:59 | one I'd have to click out to deselect
everything, then click-and-drag down again.
| | 05:05 | I also want to point out the
Selection toolbar at the bottom of the window.
| | 05:08 | Here you can see exactly where your selection starts
and stops in terms of hours, minutes, and seconds.
| | 05:13 | You can also toggle between the
End and Length Selection as well.
| | 05:15 | End shows you the timecode where the selection ends
and Length displays the actual length of the selection.
| | 05:20 | You can also type in a specific value here
as well, so if you wanted a perfect 10-second
| | 05:25 | selection, you could just click in here, type
in 10, and let me just zoom out here and you
| | 05:29 | can see I now have 10-second selection.
| | 05:30 | It goes from the 15 second
mark to the 25 second mark.
| | 05:33 | You can also adjust the values that
are displayed here by clicking the Menus.
| | 05:36 | As you can there is a wide
selection of display modes here.
| | 05:39 | You might find it useful, for example, to
select hours, minutes, seconds, and hundredths of
| | 05:43 | a second.
| | 05:43 | That might allow you to be a little
bit more precise with your selections.
| | 05:46 | So there you have an overview of some basic
selection techniques that you should be familiar
| | 05:50 | with in order to perform edits in Audacity.
| | 05:52 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Cutting, copying, and pasting| 00:00 | Continuing with our word processing analogy,
you can cut, copy, and paste snippets of audio
| | 00:04 | in Audacity just like you can cut,
copy, and paste text in word processors.
| | 00:09 | You'll probably find yourself
doing this a lot when editing audio.
| | 00:11 | I'm going to solo the first track of
my project and play a little bit of it.
| | 00:18 | (audio playing)
| | 00:24 | So let's say I want to copy the part of the
intro where I say welcome to the lynda.com
| | 00:28 | Video Training Podcast.
| | 00:29 | Maybe I want to use it in other episodes of
podcast, because I think, boy, I just did
| | 00:33 | a perfect job of that.
| | 00:34 | So we'll start by selecting
the portion that we want to use.
| | 00:37 | I am going to zoom a little bit so we can see
it better, and I'll get my Selection Tool,
| | 00:42 | and I'll select that waveform.
| | 00:47 | I'll hit play to check it.
| | 00:50 | (audio playing)
| | 00:52 | All right, so there's my selection.
| | 00:55 | Now just as with a word processor, I can
choose Edit > Copy, if I want to leave this
| | 01:00 | snippet untouched by copying it to my Clipboard.
| | 01:03 | I can also use a keyboard command of
Command+C on the Mac or Ctrl+C on Windows.
| | 01:07 | It's a pretty universal keyboard command.
| | 01:09 | With the clip copied I can now paste it into
any other track of my project or even elsewhere
| | 01:12 | on the same track just by placing the
playhead where I want the clip to appear.
| | 01:16 | For example, I could choose
Tracks > Add New > Audio Track.
| | 01:20 | That creates a new track here.
| | 01:23 | Now notice that because I still had a selection
made in that first track, the new track appears
| | 01:27 | with the selection area too.
| | 01:29 | Now I could still click anywhere in this new
track to paste in the copied audio wherever
| | 01:32 | I want, but with the selection made when I
choose Edit > Paste or use Command+V or Ctrl+V,
| | 01:37 | my copied clip appears
exactly within that selected area.
| | 01:41 | This is a quick way you can move a snippet
of audio to its own track, but also make sure
| | 01:44 | that it still appears at the
exact same point in the timeline.
| | 01:47 | You might want to do this if you wanted to
apply an effect to just that snippet without
| | 01:51 | affecting the rest of the track it came from.
| | 01:52 | In fact, there is actually a
short cut to do this very quickly.
| | 01:55 | I am going to delete this track, and
I'll just make that selection again.
| | 02:01 | So if I wanted to experiment with a selection,
maybe I want to try out some different filters
| | 02:05 | or effects instead of copying, creating a
new track, and pasting, I can simply press
| | 02:09 | Command+D on my keyboard
to duplicate the selection.
| | 02:13 | And just like that, I have a copy of my selection
to play around with on a brand-new track and
| | 02:16 | I don't have to worry
about messing up the original.
| | 02:18 | I am going to delete that track again.
| | 02:21 | So I still have this audio selected.
| | 02:23 | Now the other command you can use if you
want to paste this audio elsewhere is cut.
| | 02:26 | Cut is like copy, but in addition to copying
this section to your clipboard it also removes
| | 02:31 | the audio you are copying from that track.
| | 02:33 | Now in Audacity they are
actually two kinds of cuts.
| | 02:36 | You might have noticed that the Cut command
doesn't seem to appear in the Edit menu like
| | 02:39 | it does most other applications.
| | 02:40 | Here on Audacity it's found
under Edit > Remove Audio > Cut.
| | 02:45 | You can use the universal
keyboard command of Command+X or Ctrl+X.
| | 02:48 | Notice that removes the audio and the
rest of the waveform jumps to left to occupy the
| | 02:52 | space where the cut portion was.
| | 02:54 | Now that may or may not
be the behavior you want.
| | 02:57 | If it is, great, you have now cut out the
audio and you can paste it elsewhere and the
| | 03:00 | original track is shifted over.
| | 03:02 | Let's undo that again.
| | 03:04 | If you don't want the rest of the clip to
shift over, go to Edit > Remove Audio > Split Cut.
| | 03:11 | The keyboard command is Option+Command+X
on the Mac or Alt+Ctrl+X on Windows.
| | 03:15 | Notice that it cuts the selection, but it
leaves a gap where it was, and now I have two
| | 03:19 | separate clips on either side of that gap.
| | 03:21 | So that's the difference
between a Cut and a Split Cut.
| | 03:24 | It just depends on what you're trying to do.
| | 03:26 | Now I can paste the cut audio into another
track or I could even create a new project
| | 03:30 | and paste the copy audio right in.
| | 03:32 | You might find yourself doing this a lot if you
often have to create excerpts of longer audio.
| | 03:36 | You just select and copy or cut the portion
you need, create a new project, and paste.
| | 03:43 | (audio playing)
| | 03:48 | I'll go ahead and close that without saving.
| | 03:49 | I'm going to undo the cut, because I actually
I want to keep that in this project. And there
| | 03:53 | you've the Copy, Cut, Split Cut,
and paste commands in Audacity.
| | 03:57 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Splitting clips| 00:00 | Previously, we saw that the Cut
command in Audacity has two variations.
| | 00:03 | I am just going to select some text here, and
we'll find those variations under Edit > Remove
| | 00:08 | Audio and we have Cut and Split Cut.
| | 00:11 | As we saw, Cut removes the selected audio
from the clip and the audio to its right shifts
| | 00:16 | to the left to take up the space
left by the selection you removed.
| | 00:19 | But this is still one clip.
| | 00:20 | If I get the Time Shift Tool here, you can see I
am moving this clip altogether. Let's undo that.
| | 00:26 | Now Split Cut, on the other hand, cuts the
selected audio, but leaves a gap where that audio was.
| | 00:32 | Again, this might be useful if you just
want to get rid of some audio, maybe there was
| | 00:35 | a cough or some unwanted noise here, but
this allows you to leave the length or timing of
| | 00:39 | the track the same.
| | 00:40 | Now choosing Split Cut also leaves you
with two separate clips on the track.
| | 00:43 | Notice I can move both of these
clips independently of each other.
| | 00:48 | Having the audio on a signal track as separate clips
gives you the freedom to play around with the timing.
| | 00:52 | Maybe you want to add a more dramatic pause
in some dialog, or maybe you want to tighten
| | 00:55 | up a speech by shortening the pause
by dragging the clips closer together.
| | 00:59 | But does this mean you have to cut something
out of the audio in order to split it into clips?
| | 01:03 | Nope, you can simply split the clip.
| | 01:05 | We are going to undo a few steps here again, and
undo that split cut, so we're back to a whole clip.
| | 01:15 | Now to split a clip, first take the Selection Tool and
place the playhead where you want the split to occur.
| | 01:20 | For instance, maybe I want to split it
right before this bit of dialog here.
| | 01:24 | Then choose Edit > Clip Boundaries > Split, or use
the much quicker keyboard command of Command+I
| | 01:30 | or Ctrl+I on Windows. And just like
that I now have two separate clips.
| | 01:34 | Of course, if you can split a clip you
probably want to know how to join them back together.
| | 01:38 | You probably noticed the Join
command under Clip Boundaries.
| | 01:41 | But before we use it I need to
point out something very important.
| | 01:45 | Now I split this clip and I moved
this right clip a few seconds over.
| | 01:49 | To join clips together use the Selection
Tool and drag a selection that touches all the
| | 01:53 | clips you want to join.
| | 01:54 | But be aware that if there's any space between
the clips Audacity doesn't just remove that space.
| | 01:59 | It will convert that space into silence.
| | 02:02 | So you can see there is now a perfectly flat
waveform now indicating there's no audio here.
| | 02:08 | Now this very well might be what you want.
| | 02:10 | Maybe you split the Clip in order to add some
space and now you want to join them back together
| | 02:13 | so you can move them around
together more easily, like so.
| | 02:19 | But if that's not what you are going for,
let's Undo that, make sure you drag the clips
| | 02:23 | back together until you see them snap
together, that little yellow line appears.
| | 02:29 | Then make sure selection is touching them both
and choose Join, or use Command+J or Ctrl+J,
| | 02:35 | and now they're joined back together.
| | 02:42 | So that's how to split and join clips together.
| | 02:44 | Now let me point out one more useful command
in the Clip Boundaries menu called Split New.
| | 02:50 | This lets you select and split
selected audio onto its own track in one shot.
| | 02:54 | Just select your Audio, and I'll just use the
keyboard command of Option+Command+I or Alt+Ctrl+I
| | 02:59 | on Windows, and that moves
my selection to its own track.
| | 03:02 | Notice it cut the audio out of there and it
created a new track and placed that selection
| | 03:07 | on the exact same location within the Timeline.
| | 03:10 | Notice this also leaves the remainder of the
original audio exactly where it was so I don't
| | 03:14 | have worry about messing up the
placement or timing of that audio.
| | 03:17 | Now this might look like the Duplicate command
we used in a previous movie, which also takes
| | 03:20 | your selection and moves it to a new track,
but the Duplicate command leaves the original
| | 03:24 | audio where it is while making that copy.
| | 03:28 | The Split New command cuts that audio out
of there, creates a new track, and places
| | 03:31 | the audio on that track.
| | 03:32 | I'm just going to undo
that to set my project back.
| | 03:36 | All right, and that's how to split and join clips in Audacity.
| | 03:39 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Automating volume with the Envelope tool and Auto Duck| 00:00 | In this movie, I want to take a look at
the Envelope Tool, which is used for smoothly
| | 00:04 | controlling a track's volume level overtime.
| | 00:06 | I'm still working with My Podcast Project
file and if you recall I added this stereo
| | 00:10 | music track earlier.
| | 00:11 | I've had it muted up to this point since we've
been working with the other vocal tracks, and
| | 00:15 | if I un-mute that and play a little bit back
we'll see that the music is still too loud right now.
| | 00:22 | (music playing)
| | 00:28 | Now it's not uncommon to have music playing in
the background during a spoken word recording,
| | 00:32 | you hear this a lot in
news reports on the radio.
| | 00:34 | Now I could simply lower the volume of the
music track, and we can hear how that sounds.
| | 00:42 | (audio playing)
| | 00:46 | That doesn't sound bad but it does make
that entire music track one consistent volume.
| | 00:52 | Let's drag back to 0 dB.
| | 00:57 | So what I'm going to show you here is how
you can get a much more professional sounding
| | 00:59 | result by automating the volume level to
have the music get louder when there's no talking
| | 01:04 | and to get quieter when there is talking.
| | 01:05 | To do so we select the select the Envelope Tool.
| | 01:08 | Notice this places these gray horizontal
shadings across the tracks and it also add these blue
| | 01:13 | lines at the top and bottom of the tracks.
| | 01:14 | Also when I press my cursor over
the tracks, it looks like this.
| | 01:18 | So to manipulate the volume level of a track,
you do so by placing control points along
| | 01:22 | the lines here and dragging them up and down.
| | 01:24 | So I'll click at the very beginning of my
music track and you should be able to see
| | 01:27 | these tiny dots that have appeared here.
| | 01:29 | I'm going to drag this top dot straight down
and notice what it's doing to the waveform.
| | 01:33 | I am also dragging it slightly to the left
so it really does start at the very beginning.
| | 01:37 | And you can see I'm reducing
the volume for the entire track.
| | 01:41 | Incidentally, you can also drag the
bottom dot up for the same result.
| | 01:44 | Now I am going to look at the waveform for my spoken
word track, and I can see this natural pause right here.
| | 01:49 | Here's an area where I wasn't speaking.
| | 01:51 | So I am going to move my cursor right to
the end of this particular waveform before the
| | 01:54 | pause starts, I'm going to move it down to the
music, and I'm just going to click to place a dot.
| | 02:00 | That's where I want the
music to start getting louder.
| | 02:02 | Then I can see the waveform starts up here
again, and I'll move my cursor down and click
| | 02:08 | again. That's where I want the
music to start getting quieter again.
| | 02:11 | Let me zoom in a little bit here,
so you can see this a little better.
| | 02:17 | Okay, so here are the points that I added.
| | 02:19 | So now I am going to click next to the
first control point and start dragging up.
| | 02:24 | You can see that brings the Envelope line
up and the waveform starts getting bigger.
| | 02:28 | Now the closer I drag it to the left, the
faster the volume level will come up, the further
| | 02:32 | I go to the right the more gradual it will be.
| | 02:34 | But I want it fairly quick, so let me just
do something like this, and then I'll add
| | 02:38 | another point where I want the
volume start coming back down.
| | 02:41 | Let me drag up, I'll try to keep this in
line with the previous control point, and again,
| | 02:47 | I'll just drag a little bit to the right
for the volume to come down more quickly.
| | 02:51 | So now if I get my Selection Tool quick a
little before it, you'll hear the music swell
| | 02:56 | and then fade down again.
| | 02:57 | (music playing)
| | 03:04 | In fact, now that we're zoomed in I can
probably adjust those control points to let the music
| | 03:08 | stay up a little bit longer, so let me drag
this end point to the right a bit, just keeping
| | 03:13 | it in line with that waveform again, and
I'll drag these over so they come down a little
| | 03:18 | more quickly, and let's listen to that again.
| | 03:24 | (music playing)
| | 03:31 | So that's pretty cool, and you don't
just have to use this on background music.
| | 03:35 | Maybe you have some audio of a speaker who
is a little too quiet in some sections. You
| | 03:38 | can use the Envelope Tool to bring the volume
up at those places or even to bring the volume
| | 03:42 | down if the speaker starts getting too loud.
| | 03:44 | And I do want to point out that the Envelope
Tool should not be used when you want to fade
| | 03:48 | out audio completely, it actually can't do that.
| | 03:51 | And no matter how far down you drag a control
point, you'll still be able to hear some of the audio.
| | 03:59 | If you want a complete fade out, or fade in
for that matter, you'll have to use Audacity's
| | 04:03 | Fade In and Fade Out effects, and I'll
show you how to do that in the next movie.
| | 04:07 | But before we finish here, I do
want to show you a related effect.
| | 04:10 | When you adjust the volume of music
underneath a spoken word track, it's called ducking.
| | 04:14 | The music ducks underneath the spoken words,
pops up during the breaks or moments of silence
| | 04:18 | in the spoken track, and then ducks down
again when the speaking starts back up.
| | 04:21 | Audacity has an effect called Auto Duck,
which as you might guess does this for you.
| | 04:25 | I am going to remove these Envelope points I
added just by dragging them up out of the track.
| | 04:30 | We can't forget the ones at the beginning.
| | 04:34 | Okay, so now we're back up to full volume.
| | 04:37 | Now in order for the Auto Ducking feature to work
you have to place the control track beneath the music.
| | 04:42 | The control track is the track that you want
to control the ducking, in most cases it will
| | 04:46 | be your spoken word track.
| | 04:48 | Now my spoken tracks are currently on two tracks,
I need to place them together on the same track.
| | 04:52 | So I am going to grab the Time-Shift Tool,
which we normally use horizontally, but I
| | 04:56 | am going to use that and drag up.
| | 04:58 | I am going to exaggerate the pause a
little bit between these two clips, and I'll get
| | 05:03 | my Selection Tool and make a selection that
touches both clips, and I'll hit Command+J
| | 05:09 | on my keyboard, or Ctrl+J on
Windows, to join the two clips together.
| | 05:13 | And now I can get rid of this track because
there is nothing on it right now, and finally,
| | 05:18 | I need to move the spoken word
track physically below the music track.
| | 05:22 | And I did that just by clicking in a
blank area of the track and dragging down.
| | 05:26 | Now I select the music track, which is the
track I want to Auto Duck, and I'll choose
| | 05:30 | Effect > Auto Duck, and here you just decide
how much you want the audio to duck down and
| | 05:37 | how quickly you wanted to do it.
| | 05:39 | You can either drag these points
around in here or type the values in below.
| | 05:42 | So for example, if I wanted a slightly
quicker fade down and fade up setting, I can drag
| | 05:46 | the Outer fade out points in little
bit and the fade up point in as well.
| | 05:53 | You can see those values change down here.
| | 05:56 | Now the Threshold setting specifies how loud
the control track has to be before Auto Duck
| | 06:00 | kicks in. -30 dB is a good starting point,
and the Maximum Pause setting determines how
| | 06:05 | long the audio has to be below that
Threshold before it ramps the music back up.
| | 06:10 | This keeps your audio from jumping up
in volume during super short pauses.
| | 06:13 | Also even though the default value here is
1 second, the volume won't ramp up unless
| | 06:17 | the pause is at least as long as the fade
down and fade out lengths combined, which in
| | 06:21 | this case is 0.25 and 0.25, so you
have half a second of fading time.
| | 06:26 | Really though, the default settings
here are pretty good to start out with.
| | 06:28 | I am going to switch the Fade Points back
to half a second on each side, and I can just
| | 06:34 | type down here, and I'll click OK so you
can hear what the default setting sound like.
| | 06:40 | Depending on the length of your project it could
take several seconds to several minutes to process.
| | 06:44 | And now you can see just by looking at
the waveform that the ducking worked.
| | 06:47 | We have a small waveform as I'm speaking, and it
pops up during these gaps that you can see below here.
| | 06:52 | Let's click and listen to a couple of these.
| | 06:54 | (audio playing)
| | 07:14 | So I think those default settings are
actually pretty good in this case. And that's how to
| | 07:17 | use the Envelope Tool and the
Auto Duck effect in Audacity.
| | 07:20 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using common effects| 00:00 | If you look under the Effects menu, you'll
see that Audacity has no shortage of effects
| | 00:04 | and filters you can apply to your projects.
| | 00:06 | I am not going to go into every single one
here, but in this movie I would like to show
| | 00:10 | you a few of the effects that I think you'll
find to be the most useful the most frequently.
| | 00:13 | I've opened up the file music_bed_nofade
from the Exercise Files folder.
| | 00:18 | But, if you don't have access to the Exercise
Files, you can open any audio file you have
| | 00:21 | if you want to work along with me.
| | 00:23 | Now, in the previous movie we looked at the
Envelope Tool, which lets you automate the
| | 00:27 | volume level of tracks.
| | 00:28 | And I mentioned that you can't use Envelope
Tool to create complete fade ins or fade outs,
| | 00:32 | because it can't take the audio
level all the way to nothing.
| | 00:35 | If you want to create a Fade,
you have to use the fade effects.
| | 00:38 | Let's listen to the end of this track.
| | 00:41 | (music playing)
| | 00:49 | So, that just kind of ends abruptly.
| | 00:50 | It will sound much better with a fade out.
| | 00:52 | Now, as with just about all edits, before
I can apply an edit, I need to first select
| | 00:56 | the area I want to effect.
| | 00:58 | I'll select from about the 1 minute 15 second
mark and just drag that all the way to the end.
| | 01:04 | If I didn't make a selection, Audacity would start
fading the song from the very beginning of the track.
| | 01:08 | Now I choose Effect, Fade Out. And that's
all there is to it, there are no parameters
| | 01:14 | or other options to set.
| | 01:15 | But you can see that the Fade has been
added just by looking at the waveform.
| | 01:19 | And I'm actually seeing a bit of a problem
with this Fade, and maybe you do too. Let's Listen.
| | 01:24 | (music playing)
| | 01:36 | So, that definitely faded, but I could still
hear the original abrupt ending of the song,
| | 01:40 | but just at a lower volume.
| | 01:42 | That's because this audio track
includes a second or two of silence at the end.
| | 01:46 | And since I included that in my selection,
Audacity included that time in the Fade calculation.
| | 01:50 | It doesn't reach silence until the very end
of the selected area, and by that time the
| | 01:54 | actual ending of the song has already happened.
| | 01:56 | So, I'll undo that.
| | 01:58 | And this time I'm going to chop
off the tail end of the track.
| | 02:02 | So, I'll just make a selection here.
| | 02:04 | In this case, I don't really care that I'm
including a little bit of the waveform itself,
| | 02:08 | because I want to chop that off.
| | 02:10 | And I'll hit Delete, and now
it's a really abrupt ending.
| | 02:13 | But now I can select the
last couple seconds again.
| | 02:15 | And again, I want to make sure I lock right up to
the end, and not go beyond that, right there.
| | 02:22 | And then I will apply the Fade Out Effect again.
| | 02:24 | And in fact, Audacity remembers the last
effect I applied, so I could just choose Repeat
| | 02:28 | Fade Out or press Command+R or Ctrl+R.
| | 02:32 | And let's listen now.
| | 02:33 | (music playing)
| | 02:44 | So, that Fade Out sounded much better,
and the same applies for the Fade In Effect.
| | 02:49 | I could just select the portion of the beginning
of the song, or anywhere else for that matter,
| | 02:52 | if I wanted the song to suddenly drop out and
fade back in, and then choose Effect > Fade In.
| | 02:59 | (music playing)
| | 03:05 | So, now I have a more gradual Fade In to the song.
| | 03:08 | But the way the song opens, I
kind of like it the way it was
| | 03:10 | so I'm just going to press
Command+Z or Ctrl+Z to Undo that.
| | 03:13 | So, those are the Fade In and Out Effects.
| | 03:15 | Now, I do kind of wish there was a
way to control the attack of the fades.
| | 03:19 | In many other audio editing applications
you can choose how quickly or gradually a Fade
| | 03:23 | occurs within a given time.
| | 03:24 | But, as you saw there are no
settings for Fade Effects here in Audacity.
| | 03:27 | Now, one way you can kind of get around this is
to combine the Envelope Tool with the Fade Effect.
| | 03:32 | Let's come back to the end of the song.
| | 03:33 | Now, I mentioned before that you can't just
use the Envelope Tool to create a fade, because
| | 03:37 | it doesn't take the audio
down to absolute silence.
| | 03:39 | But, you can combine the Envelope Tool
with a Fade to get more control over that Fade.
| | 03:44 | So, I'll select the Envelop Tool and
I will just add some control points.
| | 03:47 | Again, I'll click where I want the Fade to
start occurring, I'll just add another point here.
| | 03:54 | And this way I can drag left and right to
control how quickly the Fade Out occurs.
| | 03:57 | I can do a real quick Fade Out like this,
or just drag a little bit more to the right.
| | 04:02 | I think it's something that looks like that.
| | 04:05 | And we can listen to hear how that sounds.
| | 04:11 | (music playing)
| | 04:23 | So that just gives me a little bit more
control over how that Fade is going to occur.
| | 04:27 | And that's just a way we can get around
the limited Fade controls in Audacity.
| | 04:30 | All right, another filter that comes
in very handy is the Amplify Effect.
| | 04:34 | This one can be useful if you're editing a
talk or an interview and find that some of
| | 04:37 | the portions of the track
are quieter than others.
| | 04:39 | Maybe the microphone was moved, or maybe
the person talking just moved away from the
| | 04:43 | microphone a little bit, or maybe
even started speaking more softly.
| | 04:46 | I'm going to open up another file.
| | 04:49 | Let's open up interview_low.
| | 04:51 | Let's make a copy here.
| | 04:53 | Now, let's track a bit of audio
that's a little bit too quiet.
| | 04:57 | (audio playing)
| | 05:06 | So, basically this waveform section right
about here is just a little bit too low from my taste.
| | 05:11 | (audio playing)
| | 05:15 | So, with that selected,
let's go to Effect > Amplify.
| | 05:21 | So all you do here is figure out by how many
decibels you want to increase or even decrease
| | 05:25 | the selected audio.
| | 05:26 | It's something you'll have to play around with,
by trying one setting, seeing if it works
| | 05:30 | and if not, undoing and then
adjusting the amount of Amplification.
| | 05:34 | I'll go with the default here
and see what that sounds like.
| | 05:37 | And we can see right away that
this is going to be way too loud.
| | 05:39 | We don't even need to listen,
but I'll play it anyway.
| | 05:43 | (audio playing)
| | 05:49 | So, that's a little bit
too dramatic of a change.
| | 05:52 | Let's Undo that, and try another one.
| | 05:55 | And I'll just make this a little bit
less dramatic, maybe around 3.2 or so.
| | 06:00 | So, you can see that raises it up to be about
on par with the waveform to its left.
| | 06:06 | (audio playing)
| | 06:15 | And that sounds much better to me.
| | 06:17 | Now even though we did have the ability to
adjust settings within this effect, it's still
| | 06:20 | a pretty abrupt effect.
| | 06:21 | Once you apply it, the selected area instantly
jumps up or down to the dB level that you specify.
| | 06:26 | If you want a more gradual ramping up, you
can again try using Envelope Tool to draw
| | 06:30 | in some control points for the line. Okay.
| | 06:32 | Another effect I want to show you is one
that can be really useful if you're a musician
| | 06:35 | trying to learn a song.
| | 06:37 | A lot of people play by ear and
learn by listening to music.
| | 06:40 | But sometimes the parts you're
trying to learn go by too quickly.
| | 06:42 | Let's switch over to that music_bed track again.
| | 06:45 | Now, I'm not going to select anything first,
because I want to affect the entire track.
| | 06:48 | I'm going to choose Effect > Change Tempo.
| | 06:52 | This is an effect that lets you slow down or
speed up a song without changing the pitch.
| | 06:56 | Meaning you can learn the song in
the original key at a slower speed.
| | 06:59 | For example, I'll slow this down to about 25% of
the original speed, click OK, and let's listen to this.
| | 07:09 | (music playing)
| | 07:16 | So, the song is still in the same key, but slowed
down and the individual parts are easy to hear now.
| | 07:21 | You might want to apply this effect to
spoken words if you're having trouble figuring out
| | 07:24 | what the speaker is saying.
| | 07:26 | We can Undo that with Command+Z or Ctrl+Z.
| | 07:28 | So, changing with tempo is a
different effect than changing the speed.
| | 07:31 | You can see we have
Effect > Change Speed here as well.
| | 07:35 | This can also slow down or speed up the song,
but using this effect will change the pitch.
| | 07:39 | So, if I increase this a bit, you can see
the waveform actually got shorter, because
| | 07:46 | I sped up the entire song.
| | 07:48 | (music playing)
| | 07:53 | We'll Undo that. Now, there's also a Change Pitch
Filter, which keeps the track at the current speed, but
| | 07:59 | allows you to increase or decrease the pitch.
| | 08:01 | You can use this effect if you're trying to create
a sort of chipmunk voice or maybe a monster voice.
| | 08:06 | I'll apply this to the interview track here, go with
Change Pitch. We will ramp that up to maybe 20%.
| | 08:17 | You can see the waveform stays the
same length, but now it sounds like this.
| | 08:20 | (audio playing)
| | 08:26 | I'll Undo that, and of course,
we can go the other direction.
| | 08:31 | And by the way, I'm choosing Effect > Change
Pitch again, instead of Repeat Change Pitch,
| | 08:35 | because anytime you use the Repeat command, that
will apply the exact same settings you just applied.
| | 08:39 | I want to change my settings,
so I'll choose Change Pitch.
| | 08:42 | And maybe we'll bump that down to -25%, 26%.
| | 08:47 | Again, the waveform stays the same
length, but now it sounds like this.
| | 08:52 | (audio playing)
| | 08:58 | Okay. So, there you have a handful of the
many effects that are available in Audacity.
| | 09:01 | We'll be using a couple
more of them in upcoming movies,
| | 09:04 | but a lot of these are pretty self-explanatory, or
easy to figure out once you've played around with them.
| | 09:09 | Now, one word of warning. These are
what are known as destructive effects.
| | 09:13 | Meaning, applying them
permanently changes your audio file.
| | 09:15 | Yes, you can Undo your
changes like I've been doing here.
| | 09:18 | But if you save and close your file,
there's no way to go back to the original version.
| | 09:21 | So, I highly suggest making copies of any
audio files you intend on applying effects
| | 09:25 | to, or at least creating duplicates on
separate tracks within the same project, so you always
| | 09:30 | have a backup copy in case
you really screw up your file.
| | 09:32 | If you recall, it's very easy to make a
duplicate, just by going to Edit > Duplicate, and that will
| | 09:37 | give you a copy of the track that you can
play around with, so you can feel free to
| | 09:41 | go nuts and play around with all
the effects to see what they do.
| | 09:43 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Exporting your project| 00:00 | Once you've edited your audio file in
Audacity and are ready to share with the rest of the
| | 00:04 | world, or if you just want to use it or
work on it in another application, you'll have
| | 00:08 | to save your file in a format that
can be read by other applications.
| | 00:11 | Remember, when we created a new project I
mentioned how the file system can only be
| | 00:15 | read by Audacity, because it keeps track of
information like the volume levels of tracks,
| | 00:19 | the pan settings, and so on.
| | 00:21 | When you export your audio, Audacity applies
whatever settings you've used and exports a
| | 00:25 | single file, and you can choose
from a variety of file formats.
| | 00:28 | Let's take a look at some of the options.
| | 00:30 | I have my music_bed_nofade WAV file open here,
but it really doesn't matter what file I'm using.
| | 00:34 | I just need something open so
I can show you the Export settings.
| | 00:37 | So let's say I'm done working on this file and I
want to convert it to a non-Audacity native format.
| | 00:42 | I'll choose File > Export. So like most Save
or Export windows, you can name your file
| | 00:48 | and choose where you want to save it.
| | 00:49 | I'll just choose my Desktop, maybe I want to
name it music_bed_finished or something like that.
| | 00:58 | Then you just have to choose the
format you want to save the file in.
| | 01:03 | Now as you can see there are
lots of different choices here.
| | 01:05 | Now you'll find people who swear by lesser-
known formats like Ogg Vorbis or FLAC Files, and
| | 01:10 | while they do produce great sounding files,
they usually require additional plug-ins or
| | 01:14 | special applications to play them.
| | 01:16 | If you want to export a version of a file
that just about anyone will be able to open
| | 01:19 | with a standard Mac or Windows installation,
you just have to decide whether you want to
| | 01:23 | create a compressed or uncompressed file.
| | 01:25 | A compressed file is a file
like an MP3 or an M4A or AAC file.
| | 01:31 | And these formats reduce the file size of
audio, making them a size so you can probably
| | 01:34 | attach them to an email message.
| | 01:36 | Uncompressed formats produce much larger
files, but give you the best audio quality.
| | 01:40 | But those are the formats like
the AIFF file or the WAV file.
| | 01:44 | If you want uncompressed, I would say go
with WAV, because even though AIFF is native to
| | 01:48 | Macs, Windows machines would need
QuickTime or other software to play them.
| | 01:52 | Macs are able to play both AIFFs and WAVs,
and both are uncompressed formats, so go with WAV.
| | 01:57 | Now I also should mention here that Audacity
can't actually export to the MP3 format on its own.
| | 02:02 | It requires you to download and install an
additional library, but I will talk about
| | 02:06 | that in a movie in the next chapter.
| | 02:08 | Also, depending on the format you choose,
you might be able to adjust certain options.
| | 02:13 | With the WAV form selected when I click Options, you'll
see that there aren't any other additional options to set.
| | 02:18 | But if I choose a format like the Ogg Vorbis
Files, you'll see that we have a Quality slider
| | 02:25 | here, or if I choose the FLAC File, you can
see we have a Level menu and a Bit depth menu.
| | 02:33 | But in this case I'll stick
with WAV, and now I'll click Save.
| | 02:37 | Now certain formats allow you to edit and save
metadata like the artist name, track title, and so on.
| | 02:43 | This information will show up in
apps like iTunes or other music players.
| | 02:46 | You can fill this out or leave it blank.
| | 02:47 | I'll just leave it blank and
click OK. My file has been exported.
| | 02:52 | I'll just hide Audacity for a moment,
and here is my file on my Desktop.
| | 02:58 | So if it's small enough, I could email it
to someone, or burn it to a disc, or find some
| | 03:01 | other way to distribute it, but the point
is that just about any computer should be
| | 03:04 | able to read and play this file.
| | 03:06 | Now let me show you one more export option.
| | 03:09 | We also have File > Export Selection
available to us.
| | 03:13 | You would use this command if you only
want to grab a portion of an audio file.
| | 03:17 | Rather than selecting it, copying and
pasting it into a new project, if you don't need to
| | 03:21 | make any changes, just make your selection.
| | 03:24 | Just make a random selection here, and just
choose File > Export Selection, and you can
| | 03:31 | just Name your file, pick a Save
Location, pick a Format, and click Save.
| | 03:37 | I'll click Ok, and there is my clip, and
you can just see it's a very short clip.
| | 03:52 | So that's how you export audio from Audacity.
| | 03:54 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Common TasksInstalling the LAME MP3 encoder| 00:00 | At the end of the previous chapter, we looked
at options for exporting your audio from Audacity
| | 00:04 | by going to File > Export.
| | 00:06 | I mentioned that even though you can see an
MP3 option here, Audacity can't export MP3s
| | 00:12 | on its own by default.
| | 00:14 | And MP3s are still without question the
most common file format for audio out there.
| | 00:17 | MP3s produce small file sizes and
they sound really good to most people.
| | 00:21 | So in this movie we'll look at how to set up
Audacity so you can generate MP3 versions of your projects.
| | 00:25 | I'm just going to cancel this
and quit Audacity for the moment.
| | 00:30 | First, open up your web browser and go to
audacity.sourceforge.net. This is where
| | 00:36 | you originally downloaded Audacity from.
| | 00:39 | Now the MP3 encoder is not part of Audacity, and
therefore it can't be distributed with Audacity
| | 00:43 | due to software patents.
| | 00:45 | So we have to follow some links to
get to the site where it's hosted.
| | 00:47 | I find the quickest way is to go to the Download,
click on your operating system, and here under
| | 00:54 | Optional Downloads you'll find
a link for the LAME MP3 encoder.
| | 01:00 | Now that only takes you to the
FAQs about installation and plug-ins.
| | 01:03 | You'll want to find the link that says How do
I download and install the LAME MP3 encoder?
| | 01:07 | And click that to jump down
to that section of this page.
| | 01:11 | Now LAME is a free MP3 encoder that's been
developed and used since the late 90s and
| | 01:16 | it integrates directly with Audacity.
| | 01:18 | So here you'll find links to the download
pages under both the Windows and Mac OS X headings.
| | 01:23 | Both links really just go to the same place.
| | 01:25 | So yeah, this isn't the most gorgeous
looking site, but this is where you'll end up.
| | 01:29 | If you're using Windows, you can click here
to jump down to the bottom of the page where
| | 01:32 | you'll find the link for the
Windows version of the LAME library.
| | 01:35 | Now I'm on a Mac, so I'll scroll down a little further,
and here I'll find LAME library for Audacity on Mac OS X.
| | 01:42 | So I'll click to download that disk image
to my Mac. And once it's done, I'll locate that
| | 01:47 | disk image, double-click to open it, and
I'll double-click to walk through the installer.
| | 01:59 | Now the important thing here is to not choose any
other folder location to store the installation.
| | 02:04 | So don't click Choose Folder
and choose a different location.
| | 02:06 | Notice that it's going to install this
folder called "lib" on my Macintosh hard drive.
| | 02:09 | I'm just going to leave it like that and click
Continue, and Install, type in my Password, and it's done.
| | 02:17 | Now on the Windows side of things you can just
double-click the EXE file that you downloaded,
| | 02:23 | choose to run it, and then just
walk through the LAME Setup Wizard.
| | 02:26 | Again, don't choose a different location for
where this will be installed, and install it.
| | 02:33 | Once it's done, click Finish.
| | 02:35 | So both on Mac and Windows there's really
nothing to this, you just download the installer,
| | 02:39 | run it, and let it save the files where it
needs to. And that's really all there is to it.
| | 02:44 | So now that we've installed the MP3 encoder,
I can open up Audacity, and just record a
| | 02:50 | couple of seconds here just so
we have something to work with.
| | 02:53 | I'll choose File > Export, let's call it
test, we'll save this as an MP3 file.
| | 02:59 | Now the MP3 format does have some options,
you can play around with the Bit Rate Mode.
| | 03:04 | Now the default settings here are
actually pretty good for most projects.
| | 03:06 | You can use the constant quality for the bit
rate, some people will bump that up to maybe
| | 03:10 | around 192 at its highest, 128 is usually okay.
| | 03:15 | If you're interesting in getting better
quality out of your music file, you might choose Variable,
| | 03:21 | play around with
different Quality settings here.
| | 03:23 | This allows the encoder to use different Bit
Rate Settings for different sections of the music.
| | 03:26 | More complicated sections might use a
higher bit rate and the less complicated sections
| | 03:30 | might use a lower bit rate.
| | 03:32 | Now if you want to explore this sort of thing,
it does get a little bit technical in terms
| | 03:35 | of what these different options do.
| | 03:36 | But you can read all about these
settings in the Audacity manual.
| | 03:39 | For now I'll just leave the default
settings, click OK, click Save.
| | 03:43 | Again, I can fill out this metadata information
if I need to, but I'll leave it blank for now.
| | 03:48 | And there's my test MP3 file sitting on my
Desktop, and I've now given Audacity the ability
| | 03:52 | to export my files as MP3s.
| | 03:54 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Removing unwanted background noise| 00:00 | Another popular use for Audacity is to remove
or at least reduce unwanted background noise.
| | 00:05 | I've opened up the file interview_mono, let's
listen and notice how, because this was recorded
| | 00:09 | outdoors, you can hear lot of this
sort of steady hiss in the background.
| | 00:13 | (audio playing)
| | 00:24 | Now this really isn't all that bad, but it's
a decent representation of the kind of noise
| | 00:28 | we can reduce with Audacity.
| | 00:29 | And this doesn't just have to be for
recording outdoors, just about any room you record in
| | 00:33 | has its own background noise level.
This is often referred to as room tone.
| | 00:38 | With Audacity you can identify the room tone
by creating a noise profile and then use that
| | 00:42 | profile to remove the tone from the recording.
| | 00:44 | So the first step is to capture a noise profile.
| | 00:47 | To do this you need a couple of seconds of
the background noise on its own without, in
| | 00:50 | this case, any of the
speaker's voice on top of it.
| | 00:53 | I have a little over a second of noise at
the very beginning of this clip, and you can
| | 00:57 | see that this is noise just by looking at
the waveform, it's not a perfectly straight
| | 01:00 | line indicating silence.
| | 01:01 | So I'll select that and make sure
not to grab any of the speaker's voice.
| | 01:07 | I'm going to zoom in a little bit so I
can capture just a little bit more of it.
| | 01:13 | I'll just play it to make sure
I didn't capture any of the voice.
| | 01:17 | (audio playing)
| | 01:19 | Okay, so that's just the background noise there.
| | 01:21 | Now ideally I would like to have a little
more of the background noise but that's all
| | 01:24 | I have in this case.
| | 01:25 | In general, when you're recording, it's a good
idea to grab 10 to 20 seconds of room tone,
| | 01:29 | meaning you should record just the
environment you're in without anyone talking so you can
| | 01:33 | remove it later if necessary.
| | 01:34 | Alright, so there is my selection.
| | 01:36 | Now I'll go to Effect > Noise Removal, which opens
this window, and you can see there are two steps here.
| | 01:43 | The first step is to get the Noise Profile,
which is why I made my selection, so I'll
| | 01:47 | click Get Noise Profile.
| | 01:49 | Now that closes the Noise Removal window
but Audacity now has the noise profile.
| | 01:53 | Now I need to select the portion of the
audio I want to remove the noise from.
| | 01:57 | And since it's all it I'm just going to click
anywhere to make sure that no specific section is selected.
| | 02:01 | Alternately you can also press Command+A or
Ctrl+A on Windows to select the entire track,
| | 02:05 | but not selecting anything works too.
| | 02:08 | Now I'll go to Effect > Noise Removal again,
and here under Step 2 I'll decide how much
| | 02:12 | I want to reduce the noise.
| | 02:14 | The Noise reduction slider is like a volume
slider for the noise, the more you drag it
| | 02:18 | to the left, the more you'll remove.
| | 02:19 | Just be aware that in many cases you
might not be able to drag it all the way down.
| | 02:23 | If the frequencies you're removing overlap
with some of the frequencies you want to keep,
| | 02:26 | your audio will start to sound
hollow or just generally bad.
| | 02:29 | The Sensitivity slider helps this by
letting you control how much of the audio will be
| | 02:32 | considered to be noise.
| | 02:34 | Moving this slider to the right will treat
more of the audio as noise, which will then
| | 02:37 | be removed by the Noise reduction slider.
| | 02:40 | But unless your recording is very, very noisy, you
might not have to move the Sensitivity slider at all.
| | 02:45 | The Frequency smoothing slider is a
used to blend frequencies together.
| | 02:48 | It can really help with recordings like this
one were the noise we want to remove is more
| | 02:51 | like a background hiss, which
has a wide range of frequencies.
| | 02:55 | In those cases try dragging the
slider a little bit to the right.
| | 02:57 | But if the noise you want to get rid of is
more like a single frequency, like an electrical
| | 03:01 | hum or a high-pitched whistle, you
should keep the slider more to the left.
| | 03:04 | And the Attack/decay time slider
determines how quickly the Noise Removal reacts.
| | 03:08 | If the noise is pretty consistent throughout
the audio, you'll want to use a larger value.
| | 03:12 | If it's a sound that's intermittent and happens
very rapidly, you'll want try backing off the Attack time.
| | 03:17 | And at the bottom here you can choose whether to
remove the noise or to remove everything but the noise.
| | 03:22 | You may wonder why you would want to leave
everything but the noise, but choosing to isolate
| | 03:25 | it can help you hear exactly what
the effect is determining is noise.
| | 03:28 | And you can click the Preview button at any
time to hear what affect your settings are having.
| | 03:34 | (audio playing)
| | 03:40 | So that just gave me a little sample and it
actually sounds pretty good with these default settings.
| | 03:44 | But just to illustrate how Noise Removal
does remove some of the sounds you want to keep,
| | 03:46 | I'm going to change this to Isolate so
you can hear what it's getting rid of.
| | 03:52 | (audio playing)
| | 03:58 | So it definitely does remove certain
frequencies from the speaker's voice.
| | 04:01 | You can hear him speaking in that clip there.
| | 04:03 | I may be able to play around with some sliders
to mitigate this a bit, but I think the results
| | 04:07 | are okay for this file, so I'll switch this
back to Remove, and click OK, and keep an eye
| | 04:11 | at the waveform here.
| | 04:13 | So looking at the waveform you can see how the area
I originally selected is now significantly flatter.
| | 04:18 | And that actually goes for other areas
within the waveform where the speaker paused and we
| | 04:23 | originally just heard
background noise. Let's give it a listen.
| | 04:27 | (audio playing)
| | 04:43 | So you should be able to both see and hear that
most of the background noise has now been removed.
| | 04:47 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using compression| 00:00 | If you don't have much experience working with
audio, you may wonder what makes a professional
| | 00:04 | recording sound so different
than one you record at home.
| | 00:06 | Well, obviously there are a lot of factors
like the quality of your recording space, your
| | 00:10 | microphones, and so on.
| | 00:12 | But one characteristic that gives a
recording a more professional sound is compression.
| | 00:16 | Raw audio recordings generally
don't have a uniform volume level.
| | 00:19 | Some sections are louder than
others and some sections are quieter.
| | 00:23 | When listening back to some recordings, you
might feel like you have to constantly turn
| | 00:26 | the quieter parts up and the louder parts down.
| | 00:28 | For example, look at the
waveform for this file I have opened.
| | 00:31 | Even before I play it you can tell
that some parts are louder than others.
| | 00:33 | I'm going to make this track little bit
taller so you can see the difference better.
| | 00:38 | Now before we listen I'm going to drag the
level meters out on their own and I'm going
| | 00:43 | to make them vertical.
| | 00:46 | This will make it easier to see how loud
the loudest parts of the recording are.
| | 00:53 | (music playing)
| | 01:03 | So as you can hear, and also see, there's a
significant dynamic range between the four
| | 01:07 | phrases of the performance
captured in this recording.
| | 01:10 | This is due to the way the singer
performed the song, and there's no fault in that.
| | 01:13 | You don't want to ask a
singer to be less expressive.
| | 01:15 | You want to capture a good performance.
| | 01:17 | The problem is that the quieter parts of the
recording may get lost in the mix if you start
| | 01:21 | adding other instruments. Or even if this
were meant to be an a cappella performance with
| | 01:25 | no other accompaniment or instruments, you'd
still want to do something to slightly decrease
| | 01:29 | the dynamic range within the recording so the
listener doesn't have to turn up the overall
| | 01:32 | volume, just to hear the quieter parts, or turn down
the volume so the louder parts aren't overbearing.
| | 01:37 | What compression does is it
evens out your audio levels.
| | 01:40 | With good compression you can listen to a
recording of someone both whispering and yelling
| | 01:44 | and you won't have to
turn the volume up or down.
| | 01:46 | You''ll be able to hear
both parts equally well.
| | 01:48 | So let's take a look at Audacity's
Compressor by going to Effect > Compressor.
| | 01:54 | Now this may look very
technical and off-putting at first.
| | 01:56 | But once you learn how these sliders
work together it's really not too bad.
| | 02:00 | Probably, the most
important setting here is threshold.
| | 02:03 | This determines how loud the audio has to
get before the Compressor starts working.
| | 02:06 | Let's just close this for
second and play it again.
| | 02:09 | But this time watch the level
meters and see how high the level goes.
| | 02:13 | (music playing)
| | 02:24 | So the blue line here indicates how loud
this track was, and you can see at its loudest
| | 02:27 | it reaches just above -9 dB.
| | 02:30 | Now you don't need to know much
about the dB or Decibel scale right now.
| | 02:34 | Just know that 0 dB is the loudest you can go
without introducing distortion into your recording.
| | 02:38 | But at its loudest this track is about -9
dB, and the quieter parts of the recording
| | 02:42 | only came up to the area between -24 and -27 dB.
| | 02:47 | So let's go back to the Compressor.
| | 02:50 | So now that I have the knowledge that my
recording goes up to about -8 dB or -9 dB I just want
| | 02:55 | to make sure the threshold
is set somewhere below that.
| | 02:57 | A threshold setting of say, -15 dB or so,
would affect the louder portions, but would have
| | 03:03 | no effect on the two softer phrases
since neither of them goes louder than -15.
| | 03:07 | Now we saw that the quieter portion
of the recording got to about -24 dB.
| | 03:10 | So I'm going to set the threshold to -24.
| | 03:13 | Therefore, anything louder than the
quietest parts of the recording will be compressed.
| | 03:19 | So the threshold determines when the Compressor
actually compresses, but how much it compresses
| | 03:23 | is determined by the Ratio setting.
| | 03:26 | The Ratio determines how much any signal over
that threshold is attenuated and it's usually
| | 03:30 | expressed as a larger
number over one or a ratio.
| | 03:33 | Right now it's set to 2:1.
| | 03:34 | Now the higher the ratio the
more severe the compression.
| | 03:37 | A ratio of 1:1 has no change, a ratio of 2:1
reduces the original signal by half, a 4:1
| | 03:43 | ratio reduces the signal to a quarter
of its original amplitude, and so on.
| | 03:47 | Generally, a setting of 2:1
to about 4:1 is common.
| | 03:51 | Anything higher than that is considered more
extreme compression, but where you set your
| | 03:54 | ratio is really going to depend on your
recording and what you're trying to achieve.
| | 03:58 | Now since there is such a wild degree of difference
between the loud and quiet parts in this particular
| | 04:01 | recording, I'm going to set
this to about, we'll say 8:1.
| | 04:07 | Now this is something you will have to
experiment on your own with each recording.
| | 04:10 | The Attack Time slider determines how quickly
the Compressor reacts when it detects a signal
| | 04:14 | that goes above your threshold, and the
Decay Time slider is for specifying how quickly
| | 04:18 | the compressor lets go of that signal and
returns it to its uncompressed state after
| | 04:23 | it detects that the audio is
no longer above that threshold.
| | 04:25 | Too long of an Attack Time and the Compressor
may not compress the louder signals quickly enough.
| | 04:29 | Too long a Decay Time and the Compressor Effect might
be applied to quieter sounds that don't need compression.
| | 04:34 | Again, it's something you will have to experiment
with, but I'll leave these settings here for now.
| | 04:37 | Now you might have noticed that I
skipped over the Noise Floor setting.
| | 04:40 | This is mainly useful when compressing speech,
as it can help to make sure that the background
| | 04:44 | noise isn't amplified if the person
speaking pauses for a few seconds.
| | 04:48 | If you're hearing the background noise come up
during those pauses, try increasing the Noise Floor level.
| | 04:52 | And down here at the bottom we have Make-up gain
for 0dB after compressing, and with that checked
| | 04:57 | it boosts the audio to
the highest level of 0 dB.
| | 05:00 | I'm actually not a fan of this particular
setting since it leaves you absolutely no
| | 05:03 | headroom if you have to
make some other changes later.
| | 05:06 | Now compression does usually reduce the overall
volume of the audio since it's reducing the loudest parts.
| | 05:11 | Many compressors usually have a gain slider,
| | 05:13 | so you can determine how much
louder you want to results to be.
| | 05:16 | I usually like to set it to about -3 dB or just
under 0 dB, which gives me a little bit more headroom.
| | 05:22 | We don't have that option here.
| | 05:23 | So I'm going to leave this
unchecked for the moment.
| | 05:25 | I'm also going to leave
Compress based on Peaks unchecked.
| | 05:28 | It bases the threshold and gain
adjustments on the peak values of the waveform.
| | 05:32 | I'm just going to rely on the settings
that I've made with the sliders instead.
| | 05:35 | So really all I've done here was
adjust the threshold and the ratio settings.
| | 05:39 | Let's click OK and see what we have.
| | 05:40 | So right away you can see the waveforms
are now much closer together size-wise.
| | 05:44 | The quieter areas were left untouched, but
the Compressor has reduced the louder areas.
| | 05:49 | Let's give it a listen.
| | 05:51 | (music playing)
| | 06:01 | So it sounds much more even now, but you can
still hear the dynamics in the actual performance.
| | 06:05 | The singer sings both loudly and quietly,
but I can hear both levels equally well.
| | 06:09 | Now I do in fact want to increase the overall volume
of his recording now since the compression reduced it.
| | 06:14 | Now I could undo the change by choosing
Undo Compressor, and then running the Compressor
| | 06:18 | again, and this time checking Make-up
gain for 0dB after compressing.
| | 06:24 | And as you can see that makes everything louder.
| | 06:27 | But again, I don't like
making things quite that loud.
| | 06:29 | (music playing)
| | 06:38 | So you can see right here in the level meter
| | 06:40 | that takes it right up to the very
top, right before the clipping point.
| | 06:43 | So let's undo that again, and once again
I'll choose Compressor. I'll uncheck that.
| | 06:50 | Leave all my other settings the same.
| | 06:53 | So now we're back to this original appearance.
| | 06:55 | And this time I'm going to apply
another effect, and we've seen this already.
| | 06:57 | I'm going to choose Effect > Amplify.
| | 07:01 | Here I'm going to set the New Peak
Amplitude to -3 dB, and I'll click OK.
| | 07:06 | So that increases the overall gain of this
track, but not to quite the extreme level
| | 07:10 | the Compressor was using.
| | 07:11 | And to me this is a much more manageable level.
| | 07:14 | (music playing)
| | 07:23 | So I have plenty of volume now and I
still have little bit of headroom here.
| | 07:26 | It's not taking the volume all the way up
to the very maximum. And at this point I have
| | 07:30 | been able to successfully compress the dynamic
range of my audio, and also increase its overall
| | 07:34 | levels. And I think we have a much better
and more professional-sounding recording now.
| | 07:37 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Inserting silence| 00:00 | Now I'd like to show you how to
insert silence into audio tracks.
| | 00:03 | There are many reasons
why you may want to do this.
| | 00:06 | Maybe you're recording a vocalist singing
to music and during the song you can hear
| | 00:09 | the singer clearing her throat
or coughing in between verses.
| | 00:12 | Maybe you need to generate a specific length
of silence in a track to match up with audio
| | 00:16 | that's on another track.
| | 00:17 | Now we've previously seen that you can
create silence by selecting some audio and choosing
| | 00:23 | Edit > Remove Audio and
either Split Cut or Split Delete.
| | 00:27 | You would choose Split Delete if you
don't want to paste the audio anywhere else.
| | 00:30 | And that removes the audio and
splits the clip into two parts.
| | 00:34 | You can then just drag out a selection that
touches both parts and then press Command+J
| | 00:38 | or Ctrl+J to join them back together, and
the space in between them becomes silence.
| | 00:42 | Now there is another way to get
the same result with fewer steps.
| | 00:45 | Let's undo this first.
| | 00:45 | I'm going to hit Command+Z a
couple times or Ctrl+Z on Windows.
| | 00:49 | So with the audio selected I'm going to
go to the Generate menu and select Silence.
| | 00:55 | Here I could type in the amount of silence
that I want to insert, but since I already
| | 00:58 | have a selection made it's already
filled out the exact duration of the Silence.
| | 01:02 | So I'll just click OK.
| | 01:04 | So we have the same result as
before, but with fewer steps.
| | 01:06 | Let's undo that again.
| | 01:08 | Now let's say you want insert silence, but
you're not deleting anything out of the track.
| | 01:11 | In those cases just click once to place the
playhead where you want the silence to appear.
| | 01:15 | So maybe, for example, I want the music to play
for about six seconds before I start talking.
| | 01:20 | So I could place my cursor at the very
beginning of the track, but there is already sort of
| | 01:23 | a blank space here where
there's just some background noise.
| | 01:25 | I am going to zoom in on that just a little bit.
| | 01:28 | I'm just going to trim that area off there.
| | 01:31 | So I'll select it and delete.
| | 01:33 | I'm just doing that so I can be more precise with
the audio starting at the very beginning of the clip.
| | 01:37 | Now my playhead is
already there at the beginning.
| | 01:39 | So I'll choose Generate > Silence again, and
currently this dialog box is set up to display
| | 01:44 | hours, minutes, and seconds.
| | 01:46 | We can click this put this menu
to find other increments of time.
| | 01:48 | Maybe I just wanted to display seconds, for
example, or I could show hours, minutes, and
| | 01:53 | milliseconds; hours, minutes, and
samples, or any variation thereof.
| | 01:57 | I can even show days of time.
| | 01:59 | Let's just stick with the
hours, minutes, and seconds.
| | 02:01 | And here I'll enter that I
want six seconds of silence.
| | 02:04 | I'll click OK, and that's all there it's do it.
| | 02:07 | I could deselect and when I play you
will hear the music for six seconds.
| | 02:13 | (music playing)
| | 02:22 | Now of course I could have also just dragged
the original clip to the right with my Time
| | 02:25 | Shift Tool and left six seconds of blank space
at the beginning and gotten the same results.
| | 02:32 | But I like adding the Silence and then joining
these two clips together, again Command+J or Ctrl+J.
| | 02:38 | This way I don't have to worry about accidentally
bumping this track with the Time Shift Tool later on.
| | 02:42 | And if I do, I just drag it back and I
will know where it's supposed to be as soon as
| | 02:46 | it buts up against the left border.
| | 02:48 | And you're not limited to just
inserting silence at the beginning of a track.
| | 02:52 | You can place it anywhere you like.
| | 02:53 | Maybe you need to insert 30 seconds into the middle
of an interview to allow for a commercial to play.
| | 02:58 | You can just place your playhead at right
point and insert 30 seconds of silence very easily.
| | 03:02 | OK, so that's how to insert silence either by
selecting a portion of the audio and replacing
| | 03:06 | it with exactly the same amount of silence,
as well as how to insert silence at any point
| | 03:10 | in your track.
| | 03:11 |
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| Bleeping out unwanted words and sounds| 00:00 | Occasionally you may find yourself in an editing
situation where you need to remove inappropriate
| | 00:05 | or potentially offensive words from a recording.
| | 00:08 | Now there are a number of ways you can do
this and you'll have to figure out what works
| | 00:11 | best for your particular project.
| | 00:13 | I'm still using a version of this podcast
project and there really aren't any objectionable
| | 00:16 | words in here, I think, but let's just pick one.
| | 00:20 | (music playing)
| | 00:22 | I'm just going to mute the music track there.
| | 00:26 | (audio playing)
| | 00:43 | Alright let's go with that word forming in
forming business plans. That's right here.
| | 00:50 | (audio playing)
| | 00:51 | Okay, now depending on the project I could do
something as simple as inserting silence in here.
| | 00:55 | Now we saw how to do this previously, let me
first zoom in a little bit and find the word.
| | 01:03 | (audio playing)
| | 01:04 | So I'll just try to grab the word forming.
| | 01:07 | (audio playing)
| | 01:09 | And if I wanted to just insert silence here,
I could just go Generate > Silence, the exact
| | 01:13 | duration of my sound is already included in
here, and I can click OK, and there it is, just
| | 01:18 | roll that back a bit.
| | 01:20 | (audio playing)
| | 01:23 | And it's really that easy.
| | 01:25 | But silence isn't always
going to be the best choice.
| | 01:27 | Under certain circumstances it can sound like a
glitch or a mistake or some kind of unintentional
| | 01:31 | audio hiccup. Let's undo that.
Just readjust the positioning here a bit.
| | 01:36 | Now another option that some people use is
to reverse the offending word or selection.
| | 01:40 | Just select the audio and choose Effect >
Reverse, and that's it, there are no other settings.
| | 01:46 | You can see the waveform has now been
flipped horizontally and it sounds like this.
| | 01:51 | (audio playing)
| | 01:53 | So now it sounds a little more intentional
and we don't have something as jarring as
| | 01:56 | a chunk of complete silence
in the middle of the track.
| | 01:59 | But it does have its own weird sound.
| | 02:02 | (audio playing)
| | 02:04 | But it's a little bit more of a stylish way to
censor a word or a phrase. Let's undo that again.
| | 02:08 | A third common technique is to insert a bleep.
| | 02:12 | Now I'm sure you've heard this sort of effect
before where a high pitch tone covers up the
| | 02:15 | word or words that need to be censored.
| | 02:17 | Now I don't know about you but I've noticed
a trend in bleeping where they'll bleep out the
| | 02:20 | very bare minimum of a word so there is really
no question about what that word is, but they're
| | 02:24 | still technically bleeping it.
| | 02:26 | So for example in the word forming that
I've selected here I can see the F sound right
| | 02:29 | at the very beginning.
| | 02:31 | Just select that and you
should be able to hear that.
| | 02:34 | So I'm going to leave that in there.
| | 02:37 | So it'll be pretty clear that
this word starts with the letter F.
| | 02:40 | In fact I'm just going to select the orm part of
the word forming leaving the F and the ING sound.
| | 02:46 | (audio playing)
| | 02:56 | With that selection made I'll go back to
the Generate menu and here I'll choose Tone.
| | 03:01 | This let's you generate
different types of tones.
| | 03:04 | Tones can be useful for all sorts of audio
and system tests, but in this case I just
| | 03:08 | want to generate a common bleep sound.
| | 03:10 | We can do this by selecting the Sine
Waveform and setting it to 1000 Hz.
| | 03:18 | So now I've bleeped out a portion of that
word and somehow it makes it actually imply
| | 03:21 | a stronger word was used there to me.
| | 03:23 | Of course we could select the entire word. To insert
the tone just bleep the entire word out, like that.
| | 03:31 | (music playing)
| | 03:33 | Now one other thing here is that tone is pretty loud.
| | 03:35 | If I wanted to bring that down a bit, and
there are other ways to do this, but let me just
| | 03:39 | show the Amplify effect, which we've seen
before but we've only used this to amplify before,
| | 03:43 | and actually bring that
down maybe four and a half db.
| | 03:48 | So now the tone will be little bit quieter
and in line with the rest of the levels.
| | 03:51 | (audio playing)
| | 03:54 | And taking out the entire word
maybe makes it a little less suggestive.
| | 03:57 | So there you have three ways you can quickly
handle potentially objectionable words in Audacity.
| | 04:01 |
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ConclusionGoodbye| 00:00 | And there you have it. I hope you've enjoyed
this look at Audacity and that you'll be able
| | 00:04 | to take the skills I've covered here
and apply them to your own audio projects.
| | 00:08 | If you're interested in taking a deeper dive
into the world of audio editing, be sure to
| | 00:11 | check out other courses in the lynda.com
Online Training Library, like Audio Mixing Bootcamp
| | 00:16 | and the Foundations of Audio series.
| | 00:18 | I'd also loved to hear what you use Audacity
for and what other Audacity specific topics
| | 00:22 | you'd like to see covered here.
| | 00:24 | So if you have a moment, please click the
Course Feedback button on this course's page.
| | 00:28 | So, enjoy using Audacity. I'm
Garrick Chow, see you next time.
| | 00:31 |
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