Advertisement Audacity is a free audio editor that you can use to touch up interviews, voiceovers, music, and whatever other sound files you have. Want to move beyond simple cut-and-crop jobs? Then listen up!
Knowing just a few Audacity tips can make your audio-editing life a whole lot easier. Not sure if you need Audacity? Here are Many people use Audacity for podcasts or music mixing, but that's not all it's good for., which covers everything from podcasting and making ringtones to practising foreign languages and improving your reading skills. Manually Record “What You Hear” Have you ever wanted to record the sound coming from your computer? If so, then you’ve probably tried putting a microphone up to the speakers. In doing so you were probably pretty disappointed by the results.
Fortunately, there’s a simpler and better way. You’ll need the following: • 5mm male-to-male stereo audio cable • 5mm audio splitter cable (optional) • 5mm headphones or earbuds (optional) Here’s what you do.
Please note that for Windows and Mac, Audacity is only available as a 32-bit application that may be used on 32-bit or 64-bit systems. 64-bit builds will be. Audacity for Mac is a powerful audio editing tool that surpasses default OS X tools. The downsides are a dated and sometimes clunky interface and a cumbersome installation process.
• Plug the stereo audio cable into the audio output port of your computer. This is where you’d normally plug in your headphones. It’s usually color-coded as green and indicated by a headphones symbol.
• Plug the other end of the stereo audio cable into the line-in port of your computer. It’s usually color-coded as blue. Optional: With this setup, you can’t actually hear the audio anymore. To fix that, plug the audio splitter into the audio output port (green) and then plug the stereo audio cable into one of the audio splitter’s ports. Then, plug your headphones into the other port on the audio splitter. Now you should be able to use Audacity to record the sound that you hear. Remove Background Noise We’ve covered this tip a few times but it’s so useful that it bears repeating.
If your microphone recordings tend to “buzz” or if they have a lot of “background static”, then this simple procedure will help you get rid of it. • Highlight a section of recording where no deliberate sounds were made. • Select Effect > Noise Removal in the menu options. • Click on Get Noise Profile. • Now highlight the entire recording from start to end.
• Select Effect > Noise Removal in the menu options again. Normalize If you have an audio file that’s too soft or too loud or a mixture of the two, this tip might help. In fact, it can prove immensely useful when.
First, you have to decide: • Is the entire track too soft or loud? Then Amplify. • Are only certain aspects of the track too soft or loud? Then Normalize. Both of these options can be found under the Effect menu. To use them, you just have to highlight a portion of the track (or the entire track if you want) and apply the effect from the menu.
For more information, check out the. Truncate Silence Here’s a common problem for people who work with voice recordings: frequent gaps of silence. The immediate solution is to highlight each gap by hand and press the Delete key, which works fine if your recordings are short (less than a minute). But if you’re doing that for a 2-hour recording, that’s a lot of unnecessary work. Here’s how you can cut all of that work down into one mouse click: • Highlight the entire recording. • Select Effect > Truncate Silence from the menu. • Min Duration, Max Duration, and Silence Threshold are used by Audacity to determine which parts of the recording count as “silence”.
• Silence Compression determines how much of the silence is removed. Instead of removing all silence, Audacity simply compresses it. Example: using 4:1 compression, a 4-second period of silence would be compressed down to 1 second. For more information, check out the.
Generate Sound Effects If you’re trying to create sound effects but don’t have any samples to work with, let Audacity provide the samples for you. The Generate menu has several options to help you get started. Explaining each option would be worthy of its own article, so check out the for more information on how to use each option. Of course, these sounds probably won’t be useful on their own. Try combining the generated sounds with some of the effects in the Effect menu and you might be surprised by some of the results you can achieve. Rip Audio From Video Ripping the audio from a video file is simple and straightforward. The only requirement is that you install FFmpeg for Audacity and LAME for Audacity, both of which you can.