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Since starting the Full Circle Weekly News (http://fullcirclemagazine.org/podcast), I’ve had to learn the basics of Audacity. Thankfully, since the podcast is short and pretty simple to put together, I only really need to use the absolute bare basics of Audacity.
Depuis le début des Full Circle Weekly News (http://fullcirclemagazine.org/podcast), j'ai du apprendre les bases d'Audacity. Heureusement, comme le podcast est court et assez simple à assembler, je n'ai en fait réellement besoin que des bases très basiques d'Audacity.
In The Beginning While Audacity might look somewhat imposing. Don’t worry. We’ll be using only a handful of the items in its arsenal. The first thing you’ll want to do (assuming you have a microphone plugged in) is click the microphone icon (below the menu) and select ‘Start Monitoring’. If your microphone is on and ready to begin recording, you should see a horizontal green bar flickering as the sound levels rise and fall. NOTE: For the Full Circle Weekly News, I’m not going for high quality output. Hence, you’ll see me using mono audio and low output settings. I’m trying to keep the final file size to an absolute minimum. If you have a microphone plugged in, but nothing showing in the monitoring step, then you’ll want to go to Edit > Preferences (in the menu) and in that window, select Devices. That’s where you select your playback and recording devices.
Testing Testing So, time to test things out. The main feature at the top of the Audacity window is the all-too-familiar controls such as pause, play, stop, etc. When you’re ready, click the record button (shown left, the one with the big red dot on it), and pause for a second or two before speaking. Why? I’ll show you shortly. Ok, now do your speaking. Press the stop button (shown left, square icon) to, well, stop recording. You should now see a waveform of your speech (previous page, bottom right). Pressing the play button (shown left, green triangle) will play back the speech you recorded. What’s that? You had to turn the speakers up to hear it? OK, let’s clean this up a bit and increase the volume on it.
Noise Reduction First, click the ‘Selection Tool’ (shown left, a vertical bar) from beside the record button. To zoom in/out of your waveform you can click the magnifying glass icons. What we want to do is select the empty portion of the waveform. That first second, or two. Click and drag at the start of the waveform to just where the waveform becomes taller. Like I’ve done in the screenshot. Now, in the menu, choose Effect > Noise Reduction. In the popup that appears, click the ‘Get Noise Profile’ button. The window will close. What we’ve done here is tell Audacity that the selected area is background noise. Now click the area to the left of the waveform – just above the small ‘Mute’ and ‘Solo’ buttons. This will select the entire waveform for you. Nifty! In the menu, again, click Effect > Noise Reduction, but this time just click OK. The rest of the settings are set for us from the last step. It’ll probably be small, but you’ll see a change in your waveform. Here’s mine before and after: It’s not much, but it’s cleaned up the waveform.
Amplification Now, in the menu, choose Effect > Amplify. This effect will amplify the waveform to make it louder. Where it says ‘Allow clipping’ should be unchecked. If this is checked then it will mean the amplification could be excessive and it might distort your audio – making it sound bad. The amplification setting that Audacity has chosen for this waveform is 10.36. I’ll go with that (by clicking OK). You can see that one of the spikes is just touching the bottom edge of the preview window. That’s clipping. If I’d checked the box I could up the dB setting, but it would take the waveform out of the range and possibly cause distortion. I could just as easily click Edit > Undo, select my waveform, do Effects > Amplify again and up the dB to try it out. Audacity is pretty good with its undo feature. OK. I have my waveform cleaned, and amplified. Now I can select the blank space (as we did before) and press the delete key to remove it. Same at the trailing end of the waveform. Now it’s time to save your masterpiece.
Saving Audio In the menu, click File > Export Audio. In this window you choose the file name, file format, and some quality settings. Like I mentioned earlier, with the podcast I go for low quality and a small file size, so I usually go with a 128Kbps MP3 file.
Saving Project Select the entire waveform again and, in the menu, do Edit > Duplicate. If you play the audio you’ll get a slightly louder sound. But click the ‘Time Shift Tool’ (shown left) and drag the bottom waveform to the right slightly. Now click Play. Spooky! But with the move tool you can also drag the waveform up. You can close the now empty track by clicking the X at the top left of the track. Now you’ll get the same thing twice. Pretty useless, but this shows you how to drag and drop waveforms within Audacity. The whole point of this exercise is to show that there is a File > Save Project option too. That doesn’t save an audio file. That saves an AUP file which is your Audacity project. This means you can reload your layout and continue editing later.
More? Audacity can do a million other things, but I never use them. The things I’ve shown you above are enough for me to create a quick podcast. If you’d like to see more about Audacity do let me know. For another part, I could show you how to use the Envelope Tool to create nicely controlled fade in/out effects that I use in the podcast intro (shown below). If you’ve any Audacity tricks you’d like to share, feel free to email them to me, Ronnie, at: ronnie@fullcirclemagazine.org