 using Audacity to edit audio. These days, audio editing software such as Audacity is available for free to users with any level of experience. But knowing where to begin can be tricky if you're not familiar with these types of editing tools. In this video, you'll learn the basics of how to record, edit, and export audio all while using Audacity. When you first open Audacity, you will see a big area with a timeline where your tracks will go. Then you will also see several tools in the top corner of your screen, some volume meters to help you visualize how loud your audio is, and some helpful volume sliders to increase and decrease your microphone or clip volume. Under this, there are four drop-down menus that you can use to control your sound input. This is basically which microphone you are using, what kind of audio you are recording, whether that's mono or stereo, as well as your output, which is how you are sending your audio out, whether that's through a pair of headphones or your computer speakers. Now that you have your microphone and headphones plugged in and selected, it's time to begin recording your audio. To start, press the red record button, or R, on your keyboard. First, audio recording in Audacity. You will begin to see waveforms appearing on your timeline. Check the levels at the top of your screen and make sure that your voice is coming in between minus 12 and minus 6 decibels. Second, audio recording in Audacity. Press the pause button if you want to stop the recording, but later resume recording on the same track. Last, audio recording in Audacity. Use the stop button or space on your keyboard to end the recording. Congratulations, you've just recorded your first piece of audio. It's really that simple. Now you can edit this recording, add tracks, or make any other changes you want. If you have background music you want to use or have recorded your podcast in a different program and you just want to use Audacity to edit the recording, you can bring all your clips into your timeline by clicking File, Import, and selecting your chosen clips, or just drag and drop the files into the Audacity timeline. Now that all your clips are in the Audacity timeline, it's time to begin the editing process. The selection tool is the first icon in the toolbar. It looks like a cursor. Arguably, this is the tool you'll be using the most. Click on this and you'll be able to do a couple actions. First, you can highlight certain segments of audio. Just click on the part of your clip you'd like to edit, then drag your cursor to select as much of the clip as you'd like. If it's hard to see your waveforms clearly, feel free to use the Zoom tool to make sure your selection is as precise as possible. When you have something selected, hitting Play will only play this selection. This way, you can listen to make sure you've captured everything. If you want to adjust your selection, hold Shift and click either inside or outside the selection to add or remove from it. The same thing can be achieved by hovering over the edge of your selection until your cursor changes to a pointer finger. Then just drag the edge. From there, you can delete this segment. This will automatically shift the rest of the clips into its place. You can also copy and paste or duplicate your selection. This works the same as a word processor. Select your chosen clip, then choose Edit, Copy, or use the keyboard shortcut of Ctrl or Command and C. Then you can paste what you've copied into a new track or a different place on your current track by clicking and choosing Edit, Paste, or Ctrl or Command V. To duplicate your selection, press Ctrl or Command D and your selection will appear in the same place in a brand new track. This can allow you to play around with the copy of your audio without worrying about messing up the original. The other command you can use if you want to paste your selection elsewhere is Cut. Cut is just like Copy, except it will also remove the audio you're copying from its original timeline. In Audacity, there are two kinds of cuts you can make. The first is the regular cut under the Edit menu, Ctrl or Command, X. When you use this, the audio will be cut, but the rest of the track will shift into its place, just like with Delete. The other kind of cut is called Split Cut, which is found under Edit, Remove Special. Unlike with the regular cut, a Split Cut will remove your selection, but leave a gap where it was and create two separate clips on either side of the gap. The clip you selected can now be pasted anywhere you'd like. Using the Split Cut feature is one way to turn a single track into two separate clips. Another way to do this is to use the Split function. Use the Selection tool to click wherever you want your track to be split. Then click Edit, Clip Boundaries, Split. Or you can use the keyboard shortcut of Ctrl or Command, I. The next important tool that you may find yourself using a lot is the Timeshift tool. In the Tool menu, this looks like a line with an arrow at each end. Click this icon, then click and drag any clip and you'll see you are able to move it along the timeline. You can also use the Timeshift tool to drag clips onto other tracks. Just drag them vertically instead of horizontally. The last way to split clips is called Split New. Find this action under Edit, Clip Boundaries, Split New. This feature lets you select and split audio onto its own new track. It is essentially the same as the duplicate feature we mentioned earlier. But instead of copying a selection onto a new track, it removes your selection from the original track and places it on a brand new one. Now that you've moved and edited all of your audio tracks around, it's time to talk about volume. The first thing we'll point out is the small toolbar located on the left-hand side of each of your audio tracks on your timeline. Here you can find two buttons that will help during the editing process. Mute and Solo. Pressing Mute will mute only the tracks you've clicked on and Solo will mute every other track except for the ones you've clicked on. You can tell easily which tracks are muted because they will be grayed out. There are also two sliding bars. The bottom slider controls the stereo settings. You can use it if you want one track to only be played out of the left or right headphone or speaker. The top slider controls the volume of the specific track. So if you want to raise or lower the volume of just one track, you can slide this towards the minus or plus sign. Another more professional and customizable way to control the volume of a specific track is to use the envelope tool. This option is in the main tool menu. It looks like a line with two arrows pointing towards it from the top and bottom. Using the envelope tool can automate the volume levels to get quieter or louder depending on if there is someone talking over it. This is often used for background music. Or if you have two people speaking and one person is a bit too quiet in some sections, you could use the envelope tool to bring up their volume in specific places. To get started, select the envelope tool. You'll see that this place is gray horizontal shading across all of the track, as well as a blue line along the top and bottom of the track. To manipulate the volume levels of the track, you'll place control points along these blue lines and drag them up or down. Let's test this out. First, we'll find a section of audio we want to be louder and put a control point at the beginning and end. This establishes the section boundaries. Next, we'll add two more control points within the selection. These control points will control volume. The closer the secondary points are to the boundary points, the quicker the volume changes will happen. To remove a control point, just drag them all the way out of the track. If you want to fade a track in or out entirely, you'll have to head into the effects menu, as the envelope tool can never get a clipped volume all the way to zero. When you click the effects menu, you'll see that Audacity has no shortage of effects and filters that you can apply to your projects. Scroll down until you see fade in, which brings the volume up from nothing, or fade out, which takes the volume down to nothing. Just select the portion of the track that you want to fade and choose your fade from the effects menu. Another effect that comes in handy is Amplify. This can be used if you're editing an interview and find that some portions of a track are quieter than others. Select the portion of audio you like to be louder and click Effect, Amplify. A pop-up will appear and all you'll have to do is figure out how many decibels you want to increase or even decrease within the selected audio. This is something you'll probably have to play around with until you get something that sounds the way you want. You'll easily be able to tell if it's along the right lines by looking at the height of the waveforms. If the amplified selection matches the rest of your track, chances are it will sound natural. Another effect that comes in handy is Noise Reduction. This will help to remove or at least reduce any unwanted background noises. With Audacity, you can create something called the Noise Profile, which will isolate the background noise or room tone, such as street sounds, wind, or an air conditioning hum. Then it uses that profile to remove the tone from your recording. To capture the noise profile, you'll need a few seconds of the background noise on its own, without the speaker's voice on top of it. To make sure you get an accurate noise profile, it is recommended to capture 10 to 20 seconds of room tone, meaning you should record just the environment that you're in without any talking, just in case you need to remove it later. Recording with Air Conditioning Hum Using the Select tool, highlight your background noise, making sure not to get any dialogue in the selection. Go to the Effects menu and choose Noise Reduction. A pop-up will appear with two steps to complete. The first step is to get the noise profile, which is what you should have selected. So, click Get Noise Profile button. This will close the pop-up, but now Audacity has created a noise profile for this track. Now you will select the portion of your clip you want to remove the noise from. In this case, all of it. Click Noise Reduction in the Effects menu again. This time we will use Step 2, where we can decide how much to reduce the noise. There are three sliders here. The Noise Reduction slider is like a volume slider. The more you slide to the right, the more of the noise you will remove. Be careful not to go overboard here, as cutting out too much of the background noise can make your audio sound weird. The Sensitivity slider helps this by letting you control how much of the audio Audacity will consider to be noise. Moving the slider to the right will treat more of the audio as noise, which will then be removed by the Noise Reduction slider. But unless your recording is very noisy, it will not be at all. The last slider is the Frequency Smoothing slider, which is used to blend frequencies together. Dragging the slider to the right will help if you have a lot of different background noises, such as wind, which can have both higher and lower frequencies. If the noise you want to get rid of is more of a single frequency, like an electrical hum, then you can keep the slider more to the left. At the bottom of the pop-up menu, you can choose whether to reduce, which will remove the noise, choosing Residue can help you hear exactly what the effect is determining as noise to better help you adjust your settings. You can click the Preview button in the bottom left to hear effects your settings are having. You might need to play around with these settings for a bit to learn exactly how they affect your recordings. When you're happy, click OK, and you'll immediately be able to see that the waveforms have flattened and therefore the excess noise has been removed. Recording with Air-Conditioning Hum. Once you have played around with Audacity's effects and features, hopefully you have an audio recording that you are proud of. The last step in the process is to export your project. As you've been working, whenever you save your project, it is saved as an Audacity file. This will keep track of all the changes you've made in the editing process. When you export, you'll need to convert it to a different file format. To do this, choose File, Export, Export Audio. Here you can name your file and choose where to save it. Here you can name a file format to choose from. The most common formats are MP3 and Wave. The differences here are that MP3 files are compressed, which reduces the file size, making them easy to attach to an email or submit for a project, while still maintaining a decent audio quality. Wavefiles are uncompressed, which produces much better audio quality and subsequently a much larger file size. Once you've chosen your file type, click OK. You might be then prompted to add some metadata to the file, including artist name, track titles, and more. These are used more for music recording, so you can choose to fill them in or keep them blank. Of course, there are hundreds of things you can do with Audacity, and only a few basic tools can be covered in this video. Once you're comfortable with creating simple, professional audio recordings in Audacity, there are plenty of resources available online to deal with even the most specific problem. Logging in with your college's credentials, you can check out LinkedIn Learning for some great tutorials, and more about telling stories using audio recordings or podcasts on the Learning Portal's Digital Storytelling module.