in this episode we'll be looking further
into your new audio software package - Audacity.
I want to show you around the
interface and get you to do a few simple
edits so you can advance yourself
further into the exciting world of sound
post-production.
In a previous episode I suggested you
download audacity - a free audio
workstation, the reason I suggested
Audacity is that it's free and has a lot
of common attributes to the professional
Digital Audio Workstations, it'll be a
stepping stone to being able to work on
the big bold Pro DAW's, so let's head in
and run through the interface and a
couple of edits, we'll start over the top
left, and you can see a transport bar and
the transport bar is all the usual
buttons that you get on your VHS, on your
tape machines, on any other machine that
you've probably had over domestically,
over the past few years.
You got your Play,
you got your Pause you got your
Record, Fast Forward and Rewind.
Next to that you have your Tools Section
and these are for editing,
so grabbing little pieces of audio and
shifting it around or taking a piece of
audio from one point on the timeline and
moving it to another space,
there's a Zoom tool so you
can click and drag across so you can
zoom in on specific areas.
There's also a Pencil tool - it's really handy because
sometimes your audio will have clicks
and you can zoom right into that little
bit of audio right down to the samples and
and you can draw out that click,
so that's the pencil that you're looking at
there, and then the star is the multi
tool, which is a combination of three or
so of those tools, and we'll go through
those in a second, next to that on the
top you'll see your Meters,
now we went through Meters before in the previous
episode,
this is where you're watching
out for any peeking or your levels are
too low, or too high, you need to get a
nice and warm healthy level on your
input.
The next meter across is a output meter
so any audio that you're playing will be
on that meter, if it's too loud
of course it will peak into the red, you
want a nice healthy level just over the
green on your output - just below your
input meter we have your input level, and
your output level, so you got the
microphone and you got the speaker.
So if your input level is too much you
bring that down which means the level of the
audio coming into Audacity is reduced so
you're not getting all the distortion
and cracking and hitting the red all the
time, and if it's too loud as well you
can pull your output down,
so it's literally just pull the slider,
and all the level will drop beside that,
we've got some Edit tools that you're used to
Copy/Paste etc.
If you hover your mouse
over any section in Audacity, it will
highlight and give you a little label of
what you're looking at, or what you're
hovering over.
Next to that are the Zoom tools,
and that's exactly what they are,
they zoom in and they zoom out, but
there's a few of them there, so you'll
see yourself any part of the interface,
that you just mouse over, it'll give
you a pop-up label, and whatever it does
it'll tell you what it does.
Okay so the Zoom tools..
You got Zoom In and Zoom Out,
the last one is Zoom Out the whole way,
or you can Zoom In just that section,
okay, as I say you can Zoom right in and
Zoom right out especially with the
penciling, you want to right out those
clicks with your tools, and then zoom it
to the whole area, so that's from the
start to the finish of your file.
I see the labels are coming up and the
last time we looked at this,
I wanted you to run through the manual
for yourself, so you can get a better idea
of what's going on, where now this is just an
overview to help you give you a few
pointers of what's where.
If you're kind of lost anywhere,
and I'll give you a
brief explanation if the manual isn't
explaining it here too well.
So those are our Zoom Tools.
Next to that is the Playback tool,
and there's a slider on that.
That slider goes + or - it's
set at its null, which is playing back in
real time, but if you want to play it
back slower,
you bring the slider down, or you want to
go faster you bring the slider up.
Okay, so then below that row we've got the
hardware section, and this is telling
Audacity what hardware to use for the In
and the Out, so you got your..
well right here - it's called Core Audio
because it wants to look at the internal
system, the first drop down with the little
microphone is where you select your
Audio Interface,
are you going to use the Internal...
hardware, or are you gonna use your External Interface.
The next drop down menu is saying do
you want to look at it in Stereo or Mono.
Those are your recordings, do
you want a Mono recording system,
or a stereo recording system, don't worry
about any other parameters right now.
The next thing over is telling Audacity what
hardware to use to play out the sound,
and that's another little drop-down menu.
Next to that again is what they called a
Scrubber Tool, now the scrub tool
literally just scrubs through the audio,
and when you show the scrub tool, a
little bar opens up underneath the ruler there.
The Time ruler,
I'll show that to you now in a second,
and you can bring your mouse and click in
there and drag it across, and you'll hear
it's Scrubbing through the audio,
so that's used to find specific issues in
your audio.
If you're not sure by listening to the audio
straight in real-time that there could
be an issue... if you scrub through it, it
helps you find specific points in where
say it's speech, if you're looking for a
specific word, you could Scrub through
and find that specific word in the audio
otherwise if there's an issue a click or
something, you can Scrub up across,
and scrub back, and find yourself that
specific point, and now you have the point
that you can work to,
and that's what a Scrub tool is.
For the next down...
the next row is a timeline,
and literally that it's second one through
to whenever the file ends,
could be fifty hours down that direction.
Starts here, and works across,
however long your project is,
and below that we have the main edit
window, and that contains all your tracks,
and all your audio.
So we have all the menus here, but I
want you to look at two specific things.
First off is Tracks, and these are the
basics these two things are just the
basic ones that I want you to look at.
First off if you look at tracks, you see
add new, we have Mono and Stereo and you
can ignore the others for the minute.
Your Mono track and your Stereo Track.
Music would be a Stereo Track.
Some location recording with a Mono
mic will be Mono - so if you want to set up
a new track you got to understand what
you're bringing into Audacity...
Is it Stereo or is it Mono?
Or if you're gonna do any editing with a
stereo track in Audacity, and you want to
drop some audio somewhere else,
if you're dropping stereo audio in an edit,
you have to drop it onto a stereo track.
The other thing I wanted you to look at is
File, and the simplest of things there..
New... this will set up a new project for you.
So make sure as soon as you open up the
new project you save it with a name that
you will remember, and every single time
anything you do in this - Command S on Mac
or Ctrl S in PCland Save, just save as
you go, get into the habit of holding
your command in the Mac, and hitting S or
Ctrl in PCland and and hitting S.
Save as you go, you can always undo it,
but as you go save save save...
that's a little trick from 25 years of editing
audio... it's the one time your computer
will shut down and you have nothing
saved.
So to get your initial audio into Audacity,
so we can start playing with it,
another thing in File that would be really
important, the File menu.. is Import and Export...
Import is bringing your audio into
Audacity so you can play with it, and
chop it up and move it around.
When you save the project you're only
saving the project file.
If you want to get the audio out of
Audacity after your beautiful edit,
and you got everything set up and lined
up beautifully you need to go to Export
the audio file, and that will give you the
option to export the format's of the audio,
is it a web is an OGG, MP3 and where you
want to put it so taking your beautifully
edited audio has to could be exported
out of Audacity,
and you'll have those files sitting
wherever you put them on your computer.
I'm Keith Alexander you've been watching
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