Audacity Basics 1

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Okay, so some folks had asked if I could do just some basic audacity

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Teachings trainings, so that's what this is gonna be and what I want to do is just go

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An overview of some of the basics so we end up seeing in audacity here

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Basically what we're gonna deal with this is actually a podcast that I already recorded But I'm gonna mute it for a second and Just as if it's not there so Pretend that we wanted to record say there's nothing in here now

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I'm using by the way a Mac computer. So if you're using a Windows computer, it could be different But I want to record now

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You can click this button if you have nothing here to record you can click record or the letter

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R in this case One of the things that you notice is if something's already here.

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It's going to add it to the end So I do Shift R capital R and that will start recording as you can see in a new track now each one of these is called the track and As I'm speaking you're seeing that this is getting recorded

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So I'm gonna do this just to use this as an example of some things that you can do So say

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I'm done recording. That's great. I got this done. I hit stop now I want to add a commercial so I take my commercial here and I can just drag this in and drop it in.

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Maybe it's not a commercial. Maybe it's an intro outro Now because this one here is so long it tried to fit everything in the window

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You can zoom in using this little plus sign zoom out with that minus sign

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So I can zoom in just to see and the zoom is gonna go you see where this cursor is wherever that cursor is is

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Where it's gonna zoom in If I wanted to zoom out this one to the full length or width

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I should say that's gonna go right back to where we were So if I was to zoom in over here you were my lines over here if I hit zoom

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You see it's gonna zoom in at that spot now say you have your

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Information here you have this here and what you'd like to do is kind of move this over This icon here is your selection tool

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This icon here is your time shift. So if you click on that You can now move this and the nice thing is as I move this in audacity

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You see that there goes lined up perfectly It'll show that little line where it is.

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Remember to go back to your selection tool that becomes important because you can't select otherwise

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Now, let me show you a little way to cheat. Let me move this back over and if I wanted to I could

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Just with the selection tool just select these two tracks and if you go up to tracks up here you can say a line end to end if this is what

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I do and Boom. Now, let me zoom in again because you can't really see this with this

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Longer thing that I have but you see how it lined that up perfectly That's helpful. If you want to just line up end to end now say hey, that's great

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But I'd really like to get these two in one track Well, what you could do is select the ones you want go to tracks and Do mix and render what this is gonna do is mix these into one track see that one.

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That's nice now You notice there's a little bit of silence there. One of the things

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I do instead of saying um like Things like that that people say to pause so that they can think about something just go silent why silence because you can select this and Here's a nice little trick if you go to truncate silence and I just happen to have mine at this threshold of negative 30

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DB Five second that's basically half a second duration. I'm gonna replace that with two seconds 0 .2

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seconds So what I do when I click on this, you'll see this area right here If it was silent long enough, maybe it wasn't silent long enough

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But that would remove any of the silence that fits within that time frame It's a nice little feature to do now

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One of the things that's an add -on and we could do another episode on this if folks want

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But there is something I got called compress dynamics and I can show you that this is a plug -in that I use the nice thing about this is

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With these settings I got from Daniel J. Lewis. You can see my audio here I click on that one click and it's going to give the compression so it kind of fills that out.

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So if I'm In this episode that I did that's above I'm interviewing someone our levels weren't exactly the same

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But if I was to zoom out, you'll see that they kind of filled out you can't really see so much

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Where Jamal speaking and where I'm speaking? That's what I wanted And so that's something we

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I can show you guys how to add if you're interested But say you you're sitting there you're listening

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Yeah, you didn't like that you could just highlight this and Hit the delete button

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And it's gone. That's how you do editing. So Basically, you get someone that's saying

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I'm a lot Say say this right? Well, this probably is me breathing right there

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Yep, that's me breathing. I don't like that because I breathe heavy. So boom gone

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That's what I tend to do you can listen to your what you're saying just hit the spacebar once you select it and You can hear what you say if you don't want it there just hit the delete button and it's gone

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That's some basic editing so you can select You can delete

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You can copy and paste using your regular copy paste controls So if you want to get rid of stuff just highlight it delete it

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That's I mean, this is basic what you end up doing if I look here. That's probably I hit

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I Hit the space and yep, that's me breathing again Gone just hit the delete button and it's gone.

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That's mostly what I have to do is get rid of those things So one thing to note when you're recording you want to make sure you're recording on your proper microphone you want to make sure your

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Speakers are correct here. Now notice that I'm recording mono.

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I Would argue and encourage you guys if I if I go to file export to mp3

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I Want you to notice down here. This is what I am saying that you should have all of your podcast exporting to Constant versus variable why this is the bitrate and what it's going to try to do is when it does the compression

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It's going to find the right bitrate. And so a variable bitrate can

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Well in the compression you can start having some things happen where it tries to speed up slow down things just keep it at constant 64 kilobits is what we're recommending for podcasters that are doing voice

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Please keep it at that because remember blueberry charges us and therefore we end up charging you

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Based on the fact of how big the file is the larger the file the more downloads.

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That's how they charge us So if you go higher It's gonna be a bigger file.

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Keep it at 64. It is the best quality for voice only or mostly voice

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Also mark, this is forced to mono Why one of the things you see here is let me let me record something in stereo

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Just so you can see it if you want to remove a track just click that exit sign

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So I'm gonna start recording in audio now, by the way, my cursor was over here and that's why it started over there

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It didn't start at the beginning, but notice that there's a two tracks here Now if I want to stop

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I could just hit the stop button But if I by the way You can just use your mouse to scroll back and forth or you can use this down here to scroll back and forth

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But notice it didn't start in the beginning Because of the fact that that this is where my cursor was when

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I hit the record Now if you have a stereo track and you want to force it to be mono

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Just click on this little option here Go to split to mono and remove one.

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That's what I do all the time. But now we don't really don't want this here Well, maybe we don't want this Dead spot there.

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Okay, just select that hit delete if We want to get rid of this all together we want this at the beginning we would take our time shift tool

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Grab this and just slide it on over Okay, it's really that easy to do.

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Don't forget to go back to your selection so those are some of the basic things you have your

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Control up here for your microphone you may want to make sure that's up at max and your speakers up and Then control it through your soundboard or whatever and so these are just some basic things for you to do

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Again, most often what you're doing is taking something you don't want you highlight it you hit delete and it's gone

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This right here is breathing. So typically typically what I would do is I'd be I'd hit play.

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Oh I just heard my breathing right there. So what do I do? Highlight it hit delete and then what

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I do is I back up a little to make sure that still sounds good Notice this right here and another breathing.

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So let's just highlight that Delete it go back That's basically what

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I do for for the editing. Those those are most of the tools that I end up using There is a lot of different effects.

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You could do if you want And we can go over those in later videos

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But I just wanted to give you guys some basics And so once I have this done the way I want

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I'll get rid of that Then I go to file export mp3 and Well, this is muted so it didn't find anything, okay, so let's do that again for you export mp3 and I give this a title now.

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I want you guys to notice these titles what I've tried to do Some of these are actually too long

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But you want to have a title that is short. You can see how I've titled this

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So wrap is the wrap report I give the episode number

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I'm Thinking that I'm gonna be doing a thousand episodes of my weekly wrap report.

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So I have four character four digit There you don't have to do that. I put the zeros so that when it sorts it always sorts properly

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I have the W there just because it's my weekly versus my daily and then I give it a dash in a very short

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Title you want this to be short? Just because of the fact that the the file name doesn't actually mean anything anywhere

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But if you're looking up on blueberry, it is hard to read sometimes So try to name it this way that would be helpful and So those are some basic editing tools for you with audacity.

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I'll do more videos as you guys Have more questions. Feel free to reach out to me and let me know as you have questions.