Sound Editing with Audacity

Hi, it's jane gardner again. And today on step in front of the camera, I promised to have a look at audacity because it should be in your tool box for doing video and I'll say why later, but let's first off find out where you can find it. So let's go and have a look at the presentation.

So Audacity is a software that you can use that's free. It's open source, which means it's free and it's a digital audio editor and recording application software available for Windows mac, Linux and other unix-like systems. And so basically you can get it at Audacity, I believe it's a dot  org back slash download.

Of course, you can download it from there and you can download it for Windows mac or Linux and you have to of course choose if you want it as a 32 or 64-bit version and you can then choose which one you want and download it. So that's  go have a look at it. We just get my screen here.

Here we go. So I've got it on my desktop and first off, we're going to show you once you've downloaded it and you open it. This is what it looks like. And the first thing you want to do is check that you've got the right microphone and the right speaker as well. It doesn't matter about speakers, you can always change your speakers, but you have to have your microphone set up and this is where you choose your microphone, the system asks to decide which one of those you have available, and then you pick the one that you want.

So there's my microphone. And then you could do stereo, but you don't really need it. But you could try it out just to see  and of course, you could do mono recording and of course, you can expect your speakers. So for later. So I used my real tech audio.

Mm hmm. And then up here, this is the microphone volume been a while since the recording volume 0. 0. I don't think so. So we've got to change that. Get up to 50%, see if that works, and speaker. Well, that's already maxed. And so really what you do is this is of course pause, this is play, this is stop, reverse forward and there's a record button.

So let's do this in real time. And we're going to see later whether or not we can hear the sound. So yeah, so audacity is a great tool to use for you when you're doing video, doing podcasts, or doing any recordings for voice because you can come back later and edit your Audacity. And you can also import your audio from your video.

So if you split it out of your video using Camtasia for example, you can import it up here. I don't think it does work. So you can import your audio from here and  export, we'll talk about in a minute. But so you know what I'm busy recording and you can see what my recording levels are. And they're looking pretty good.

You can sometimes see that it goes into the red, which is not what you want. So let's stop that for now. And then I'm going to find out if I can hear this by playing it back, but you probably won't be able to until I figure out how to turn on my stereo. So hold on, stop that.

And then let's go back to the beginning. Mm and then we'll show you some editing is that you always use so you can play and I can hear it but I'm sure you can hear it  doing any recordings  for voice because you can come back later and edit your audacity and you can also import so you can make the volume.

The waveform of this looks bigger than we are. Where are we here? There's your gain again. Remember, gain. And let's see. Mhm. And of course, we will talk about that later. So what you can do is go back to the beginning, go back to the beginning.

And actually, this has got pretty much a lot of sound on it, but you can zoom in zoom in so in, and then you can tune out of course. And then are we here tracks. So anyway, um you can select part of it and say this. You think this is the noise sound in your track.

Then you click here, then you go and edit. So we can remove that. We can do effects is the most important part. If you think you have your have too many, too much background noise, you can do a noise reduction. So you click there. So first you still have to select the auto that you want to choose the audio that you want to choose to make it sound?

Say that's your noise profile and then where is that noise reduction and then select all the otto you want filter and how much you want filtered out. Example. And then you tell it how much of this you want to be filtered out. So let's go back to your fast noise reduction and go, so let's listen to that, see if we can tell the difference.

So Audacity is a great tool to use for you. Yeah, I even don't like that noise really, I like the noise that was there. But anyway, so audacity has a manual and I could probably do some trainings on how to use Audacity. But yeah, it's really important for making your audio sound great.

So let's get out of this for now and say that this is one of the tools that you should have when you're doing video, you can do it using Camasia and two or another tool. But um, this is a free tool. So we can always like free and yeah, so audacity is one of these, you should add to your list to use for making your audio sound great for your video. You can try it and just use it for podcasting.

So you could record your voice in Audacity and add music and all that kind of thing without ever having to use video. So you could use it for podcasting and you can use it for, I'm creating better sound on your video.

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