Audacity

Arlo Calles ICT 320 Final Project Audacity

Many times we need to edit an mp3 or wav audio file, or even record something for a presentation or a project. Audacity is a great (free) tool that can help us save the day!

We are going to download the latest version (2.0.5 as of now) from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/

Audacity has versions for Windows, Linux and Mac. Download the one according to your system (zip or exe file) and double click to install it.

If this Security Warning window pops up asking to verify, just click on Run to continue.

Then click Yes on the User Account Control window to install it.

Select your language and click OK.

Click Next.

Click Next on the Information window.

Select the directory where you want to install Audacity and click Next.

Select an option if you want to add shortcuts and click Next.

Click on Install to finish.

Click Next again.

Audacity begins to install.

And now click Finish.

You will now have Audacity running on your computer!

Lets start.One of the most common audio formats in a Windows machine is Windows Media Audio with the file extension wma.

Lets click on File > Open to edit this type of audio format.

It will say that we need to first import some libraries like FFmpeg to be able to work with a wma audio file in Audacity.

So we will get an error if we tried to import this file into Audacity.We could find a work-around to convert the wma to wav and then import it, but we can fix this by adding the libraries we need.

So lets go to Edit > Preferences > Libraries to download them.

The Download button will eventually take us to the page http://lame.buanzo.org/#lamewindl to get the FFmpeg libraries.

Lets download both libraries and install them, LAME and FFmpeg for Audacity.

Once we have installed them, Audacity will automatically apply the new settings and we will now be able to import our wma audio files.

Audacity now displays the audio file and we can now start working on it!

If we would like to start working with a segment of the audio track, just select it with the mouse. The left side (dark grey) is the area that has been selected.

We can delete or remove this segment by clocking on Edit > Remove Audio or Labels > Delete.

Zoom in the audio track by pressing the zoom icon on the menu and navigate to the right-end of the track.

Select the last segment only. We will not fade out this part.

On the menu click on Effect > Fade Out and it will reduce the volume of the selected part. Do CTRL-R to repeat this process. This is very useful when we need our song or radio ad to finish from more to less.

The selected right side of the audio is now smaller than before with this fade out effect.

You can also try more audio effects like Amplify or Noise Removal which come in handy very often.

Lets say that we have recorded our voice and need some background music to accompany our track. So now click on File > Import > Audio or CTRL-SHIFT-I to add a new file.Audacity splits the window into two tracks. The one we opened first is at the top. The one at the bottom is the recently imported audio file that we will use to mix it with.

We can have both of these files mixed and saved as one single file.

Lets export our final file. Click on File > Export and save it as mixed_audio and select MP3 Files from the drop-down Save as type list.

Click OK to mix the audio tracks.

You may also fill in some information about your new track. Click OK.

The mixed file now starts to export.

We can now see our file has been exported as an MP3 audio file.

If we open our mixed_audio.mp3 file with Audacity, it will show both tracks mixed!

You may use many different effects and options to come up with creative ways to produce audio files or combine tracks, split them, and make your own spots!

Audacity is a great and FREE tool that can achieve great things with audio files!

I uploaded my avi video file and can be directly downloaded from here:http://web.nmsu.edu/~arlobc/ICT320/Arlo_Calles_ICT_320_Video_Audacity.avi

Also the video is in my YouTube channel:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScScyQNotik