In this video, I’ll show you how to record and edit audio using Audacity. Get Audacity – https://www.audacityteam.org/
Sections:
- Downloading Audacity
- Configuring Audacity
- Recording Audio in Audacity
- Editing Audio in Audacity
- Exporting audio as Mp3 in Audacity
Video Transcript
In this video, I’ll show you how to record and edit audio using Audacity.
Hi, my name is David and if this is your first time watching my videos, and you get value from the content that you watch, kindly consider liking this video and sharing it with your friends so that we can all learn together.
Audacity is a free and open source, digital audio editor that you can use to record audio on Windows, Mac, Linux, or any operating system that you use.
So you can just check it out of all from any web browser that you’re using.
Audacity and just click on the link that comes at the start.
That is audacityteam.org.
Just click on that.
And basically the reason why I’m doing this particular video is because you may want to add audio to Google Slides.
Google Slides by default doesn’t support narrating on the slide, at the time of recording this video.
And adding that audio to let’s say Google Slides and in the next tutorial, I’ll show you how to add the audio that we are going to record in this particular tutorial to a Google Slides presentation, therefore you may want to stick around for that.
So once you come to Audacity, since it’s a cross platform, audio software, multitrack, editor, etc. all the good things for free. Just come to download and select your operating system.
For example, if I’m on Windows, I’ll just click on Windows.
Once I click on Windows, the current version is 3.0.
Your download will start in a second, etc.
Or you can use these directly.
It’s a small application- 28 Mb and does awesome work.
Since I already have audacity installed.
And I know I have a lower version. I’ll just stop this so that we can continue and configure audacity to our liking.
So let’s just open up Audacity. Here we go.
And I’m using audacity 2.4.2.
But as you’ve seen, we have audacity 3.0.0, just click OK.
Now by default, if this is your first time running Audacity, you’ll need to configure your microphone, and maybe your speakers etc.
So what you need to do is just come up to edit, preferences and then set device.
Personally, the only thing I need to do here is check if my playback – what you’re going to be listening through to your audio is set correctly and also the recording.
So as for the playback device, I’ll ensure that it is the speakers- Focusire USB audio, because I have some headphones that run through the Focusrite Scarlett solo.
And then I have the device, which is the analog 1+2 Focusrite USB audio.
And what is– the microphone I’m using is an Audio Technica AT2020.
Yes, I believe that’s that’s correct, that goes through the Focusrite Scarlett solo.
So I’ll ensure that you set that and I want it to be in stereo, and if you’re satisfied with that, just click OK.
Now that we have set our audio interface, that is what is going to be recording and what we’re going to use to listen and you can see that here, all we need to do is press on the red button, which is the record button.
And this is the stop button.
But to record and I’m going to do just a simple demonstration.
Let’s just hit record.
“Welcome to this tutorial. So if you make a mistake, you can just stop or even clap to do a retake.
Welcome to this video. My name is David and it’s good to have you here.
If at any point you find anything that you see in this video valuable, kindly consider commenting, and let me know what changed your life or what you learned in this particular video.
Once it has.
Once you’re satisfied with the recording, just click on stop.”
And I’ll pick up my headphones just to listen through to the audio.
So I can start off by pressing on Ctrly A and then press on this particular magnifier to fit my selection in this particular interface.
So that I can see everything.
I can’t just play to listen to the audio.
“Welcome to this tutorial. So if you make a mistake, you can just stop or even clap to do a retake.”
So I’ll just pressing the spacebar to stop. And you notice that the audio doesn’t begin until somewhere here.
So the first thing that we can do is that we can just take this back –that is you click on this particular section, and then hold the left click and move it to the beginning of where you want to cut, press Delete.
And once you press the delete key, the audio section that you did not want or the area section that you are doing your takes and retakes is taken out.
So, you’ll notice that I’m leaving a couple of seconds here.
And this is to help me capture the noise profile if you want to take out some room noise, or some background noise, etc.
Let’s play again.
“Welcome to this video. My name is David and it’s good to have you here. If at any point you find anything that you see in this video valuable, kindly consider commenting, and let me know what changed your life or what you learned in this particular video. Once it has..Once you’re satisfied with the recording, just click on stop.”
So let’s say our audio is up to this particular section.
Hold this particular section again, once you see the finger pointing and move it to the end, let’s say we want to remove that particular section, press on Delete.
The one thing that you notice is that our audio levels are pretty low, we can slightly amplify this by let’s say normalizing our audio.
And I’ll just click anywhere, press on Ctrl A and then click on effect. normalize.
Let’s normalize to like a peak of -3dB. That is the higher peaks, we’ll get to minus three dB. Click OK.
And we see our audio now is a little bit better.
If I just press on this, to fit in this particular selection, and play.
“Welcome to this video. My name is David and it’s good to have you here. If at any point you find anything that you see in this video valuable, kindly consider commenting, and let me know what changed your life or what you learned in this particular video.”
So that’s our recording, we have recorded and edited an audio in Audacity, you can save this particular project by going up to File, Save as – project- lossless copy, compressed copy whatever you want, if you want to save it to use it later, as a project inside Audacity, that’s really good.
And it allows you to always manipulate it as you wish before you export it as an audio mp3 or WAV form.
But let’s say all we wanted is to just export our audio as an mp3, then we can do that easily.
So let’s call it slide one for Google Drive.
So that’s enough.
And then you can set the quality, I’ll just go with a constant of 192 kbps, Joint stereo, just click Save.
This section is for metadata. But there’s nothing I’m changing. I’ll just click on OK.
And our audio is saved.
If you navigate to the folder with the audio, you will notice here is the audio.
And if I just double click on it, it’s going to play inside Windows Media Player.
“Welcome to this video. My name is David and it’s good to have you here. If at any point you find anything that you see in this video valuable, kindly consider commenting, and let me know what changed your life or what you learned in this particular video.”
And there we have it.
I’ve walked you through the configuration offered a city which is a free open source audio recording application that’s pretty robust with a ton of effects that you can use to record your audio and edit your audio the way you want it to be.
So in the next video, I’ll show you how you can add this particular audio to your Google Slides.
And that brings us to the end of this tutorial.
I hope this video has been of value to you and that you’re going to use the tips and techniques that you’ve learned from these to start recording your audio voiceovers and slide narrations easily using Audacity.
My name is David.
Thank you for watching, and until next time, stay safe and never stop learning.
Thank you for watching this video.