Let’s start today’s blog out with a little something I like to call the “Truth Tree” let’s all climb up and tell the truth to each other…some of you suck at recording. That doesn’t mean you suck at music, it means you can’t seem to figure out how to record or edit your track and make it sound right. We sound better with our on-location equipment that we’ve been using this summer! Ok. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you, I’m just not IN LOVE with your recording. But I still want to save “US” so I’m going to teach you how to record and edit…and I figure the best way to do this is to teach you all how to use a FREE SOFTWARE to do it. Who doesn’t love free stuff.
What You need for this tutorial:
- Audacity 1.3.7 (I use this because I have Vista, and all of the parts of the tutorial are going to be based off this. The other version is stable but it will look a bit different.)
- Lame.dll(You need this to export the finished product of all things audacity into a .mp3 – the link provides the steps needed to install.)
- Download: Ali Bump (We are going to use this .mp3 for editing purposes today so DL it for the lesson.) Click the name to download.
The Lesson
Today we are going to start off very basic and familiarize ourselves with the basic controls and lay out of audacity. There will be no recording today, you see how I didn’t mention anything about mics or i/o above? Yeah, there is a reason for this. You can’t just jump in and record on any software, even the free kinds. What we are going to do today is learn how to import a track into audacity, how to edit that track, and how to export it all into a .mp3. I’m going to assume that before we get into step 1 that you have installed audacity AND the lame.dll.
The Steps
Step 1
- Open Audacity. If this is your first time opening Audacity it will give you some message about what you can do with audacity and all that stuff, for right now you can just close it (it’s always a good idea to read through that stuff, but for right now you can close it.)
- What you should have now is an empty screen with no tracks. It should look something like this:
Audacity...a little cut off but good enough
All I really want you to see from that is that the screen is empty…which you can clearly see.
Step 2
- Now we are going to put something into that screen (remember where you downloaded Ali Bump.mp3 on your computer because now we are going to need it.)
- Go to File>Import>Audio… and when the box appears find where you put the Ali Bump.mp3 and import it now.
- It should now look something like this:
Your Screen should look something like this
- Hit play and confirm that it sounds right. Which it should.
Step 3
- Now lets have some fun, select the “Selection Tool” it’s the one that looks like a cursor that you use…to SELECT text…hence the name.
- Click, Hold, and drag – like you were going to highlight some text – to highlight some audio. Highlight a selection now and hit the play button.
- You should find that it will now only play what you have highlighted. Play around with that for a minute or two so you get a feel for it.
Step 4
- Select the “Zoom Tool” it looks like a magnifying glass.
- Now what we are going to do with that is click it one time on the track so we can see a little bit better what we are doing.
- Your track should look like this:
See how everything is a zoomed in? It can't even fit on the screen...that's ok.
- Now hit play. You’ll notice it looks like it’s moving faster and you can make out the spaces in the audio a little bit. That’s going to be important for the editing that is coming up next.
Step 5
- Go back to the selection tool.
- What you are going to try to do now is highlight just the area of audio where it sounds like, “Hi this is hot ali and” (She kind of slurs and/your together so cut it somewhere that it feels right.)
- This is going to take some trial and error, remember you can use your ZOOM and highlight tools to help you.
- It should look something like this:
See how just the part we want is highlighted?
Step 6
- Now we are going to click the ‘Trim’ button. (Or you can go to Edit>Trim.)
- Now we have this:
Now all we have left is the text we selected
Step 7 (Optional for some)
- Now take the “Time Shift Tool”, the line with arrows on each end, and slide the selected part to the beginning. (Of course this only needs to happen if you cut off the second or so of empty air at the beginning of the .mp3. You didn’t have to, but you could.)
Step 8
- Now that we have just the audio we want, we are going to have some more fun. Again go to File>Import>Audio… and select the hot ali bump again.
- You should now see that you have 2 tracks like below:
2 Stereo tracks should now be on your screen
Step 9
- Click on the 2nd Ali bump that you imported and click the button that says “Solo”. This button can be found on the left side of the Track under the track name next to the button that says “Mute”.
- When you click the solo button the track above should turn gray, and when you hit play the only track you hear is the one that was selected as the “solo”.
Step 10
- Now that we have the 2nd Ali Bump as a solo let’s do some more editing.
- Using the magnify and select tools find in the track where she says, “The Nooge” and highlight just that audio.
- Again use the trim tool.
Step 11
- Click the “Solo” button again, now both tracks should be blue.
- Using the “Time Shift” tool bring the 2nd track back so that it starts where the first ends.
- It will look like this:
2 tracks, back to back
Step 12
- We are going to import yet another copy of the ali bump into this project. File>Import>Audio…
Step 13
- Again “Solo” the newest ali bump in your project.
Step 14
- Now using the Selection and Zoom tools find the area of the track where Hot Ali says “Is Hot” and highlight it.
Step 15
- Hit the Trim button.
Step 16
- Slide this 3rd track to the end of the second track using the “Time Shift Tool”
- And hit that solo button again so that all tracks are once again blue.
Step 17
- Your track should now say, “This is Hot Ali and The nooge is Hot.”
- Kind of choppy, but it gets the job done right?
Step 18
- We are now going to make this a .mp3
- Click on File>Export
- Now there should be a “Edit Metadata” box open. Something like this:
Meta box
Step 19
- We are going to edit that data.
- In the Artist name field put your name.
- In the Track Title put ‘The nooge is hot’
- In the Album Title Field put ‘Audacity Tutorial Part 1′
- You can leave the rest blank and hit the “OK” button.
Step 20
- It should now have a “save” box opened. Be sure that it says MP3 Files under the “Save Type” field.
- Remember where you are saving this and save it as “Audacity Tutorial Part 1″
- It should export the file as a .mp3 now.
- Find the .mp3 and play it using whatever you use to play a .mp3 normally. (You should see the Artist name, and track info will show up as what we entered it as.)
- You can now close audacity, it will ask you if you want to save, you can if you want, but I’m not going to. We have the .mp3 we are going to need for tomorrows lesson.
Review
After today you should be fairly comfortable importing a track, selecting a portion of the track, and trimming it. You should also be familiar with the Time shift tool AND the zoom function.
Tomorrow we are going to edit that track using some other features to see if we can’t make it sound like we didn’t just piece it together. If you have any questions please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer it.