 This video is brought to you by the University Libraries Sanford Media Center located on the second floor of Gorgas Library. Today we're going to talk a little bit about basic audio editing in a free program called Audacity. So we'll just jump right in. If you go to Google and just search for Audacity. The first thing that pops up, just go to Audacity's website and hit download. And you can download Audacity for Windows or Mac for free. Just download that and run the install program. And then open up Audacity, which will look like this. And then take your audio recording that you want to edit. It can be an audio recording from your phone that you have saved in Dropbox, Google Drive, UA Box. Maybe you have it on a jump drive. Just download that to your computer. Or if you've used an audio recorder from the circulation desk, you can get the file off of the SD card. But get that file onto your computer and open it in Audacity by clicking and dragging it into the Audacity window. Or clicking File, Import Audio and select the file you want to open. Either one is fine and you should be ready to go. However, one little pro tip that I like to tell everybody is to not edit your original audio recording. I just feel like it's safer if you put all of your files into a folder with your project name. Take your audio recording, whatever it is, and just right click on it and hit duplicate on a Mac. Or make copy or copy on a Windows machine and then open and edit that copy. Just to play it on the safe side so you don't mess up or lose your original audio recording. So that's definitely a recommended starting tip. But let's say I've got a copy of my vocal recording for my podcast or a voiceover for a video project or a group audio project or narrative essay, whatever audio you're working on. Just bring that copy in and get ready to edit. The first thing you want to do once you've got your file in Audacity is make sure you click File, Save Project. And that will give you an Audacity project file, which I've already started one. And you'll see it here. It's called paris.aup. That is an Audacity project file, not an audio file. If you turn in this aup file to your instructor, they will not be able to open it in most cases and will not be able to hear anything. So you need to make sure you keep your Audacity project file with your original recording and the copy of your recording that you are editing. So keep all of your stuff together and that's why I recommend putting it in a project folder and then you should be ready to start. And remember to save frequently. You can also save multiple copies if you want to keep maybe an original edit and then maybe you change some stuff and you just want to see how that sounds down the road. You can have multiple Audacity project files, that's fine. Just remember to keep everything together so you don't lose any data. But once you've got your file in Audacity and you are ready to start cutting some of the trash out of it maybe some gaps where you paused too long or some noises that you didn't expect it can be just about anything. Maybe you messed up and said the wrong word. You can delete all that kind of stuff out. And it's as simple as listening to your audio file and then finding the areas that you want to delete. And to do that, first I like to zoom in. You'll see some magnifying glasses over here on the top right. You can zoom in and out by hitting the magnifying glass with the plus sign or zoom out with the minus sign. So let's zoom in just so that kind of fills our screen a little bit better. And let's take a listen. And this is just a recording of me reading something off of a Wikipedia page about Paris, France. Okay, I'm just going to record my voice reading a little bit off of a Wikipedia page. Okay, one of the things you want to look at when you start going through your audio recording is the audio meter up here at the top right in the middle. Right in the middle. You'll see a negative 12, about 75% of the way up the meter. And that's kind of where you want your audio volume to top out. So let's listen to that again. And pay attention to that meter. Paris is the capital and most populous city of France. Now this audio is pretty good just starting out. You'll notice if something gets past that minus 12, it starts turning yellow or red. That means your audio is clipping or peaking. It's too loud. So there's multiple ways you can turn that down or up if necessary. And I'll show you those really quick. So let's look at mine one more time. Paris is the capital and most populous city of France. So let's say mine's a little too low. The first way you can increase the volume if it's too low will affect globally, which will affect your entire track. So it will affect everything. So you may not want to do this method starting out. But if it is way too low or too loud starting out, you can do this by just grabbing this slider right here. It says gain when you mouse over it and bring it up or down. And I'll show you the effect of that. Okay. So let's take a listen. Voice reading a little bit off of a... Now you'll notice it's topping out right here in the middle. So that's way too low. So I'm going to bring that back up and you want it to bump up to that minus 12. Voice reading a little bit off of... I could probably bump it up one more notch. Voice reading a little bit off of a Wikipedia page. All right. That sounds pretty good. So that's how to adjust sort of the volume of your track globally. You can have just a section that is too low or too loud. You can just highlight that section with your default selection tool, which is what you'll be using most of the time. Just highlight a section and hit effect, amplify. And then just like the slider we used over here, you adjust this slider to wherever you want and it will only change the highlighted section. And you can preview that. In an area of 105 square kilometers or 41 square miles. Okay. That sounds okay. So we'll hit okay and you'll see what it did there. It made it a lot louder. In an area of... And look at my meter up here. You'll see it's in the red. In an area of 105... That means it's clipping or peaking the tops of these waveforms that look like mountains are too high. So we need to bring that back down. So let's just highlight that section again. And we'll hit effect, amplify. And we'll bring it down some. And let's take a listen to that. In an area of 105 square kilometers or 41 square miles. That's perfect. It's bumping up to that minus 12 regularly and not going past it. So it looks fairly uniform with the rest of our audio size wise when you're looking at that waveform. So that's good to go. That's how you will move through your entire audio recording, keeping an eye on your audio meter to make sure all of your audio levels are good. And once you've done that, you can start cutting out some of the fat so to speak. Let's say you've got some quiet gaps that are too long. Let's check this one right here. Seat of government. Yeah, that's a bit too long of a pause. So to delete some of that, we just highlight it and hit delete. Let's see if that sounds a bit more natural. The center and seat of government. Still a little too long. So we'll just trim a little bit more off. Highlight it and hit delete. Center and seat of government. Still a little too loud and it sounds like I messed up at the beginning of that next sentence. So let's take a listen to that. Let's see which has an estimate. Okay, let's delete some of that. Let's see how this sounds. Center and seat of government. Has an estimated official 2020. I deleted a little too much. I think there was a word which in there, I cut out. So we'll just undo that by hitting edit undo. And I'll trim a little bit less. Center and seat of government. Which has an. I'm going to get this. I'm going to zoom in more so I can get closer. Let's see. The city of Paris. Which has an. Okay, so it looks like this little blurb here is the word which. So we'll delete this other part. And see how that sounds. Which has an estimated official. Deleted the first part of the word which. Which has an estimate. Perfect. All right, let's check our gap now and see if it's too long to government. Which has. Yeah, we can probably delete most of this gap since it sounds like I paused in the middle of a sentence. And see how that sounds together. Let's see how that sounds together. The city of Paris is the center and seat of government which has an estimated official 2020 pop. Now see there you can tell that I fixed sort of a pause in the middle of a sentence and cut out a little bit of where I may have misspoke there at the beginning of that sentence when I came back in from pausing for a minute. And you just go through your entire project file and do that further for your whole recording trimming out some of the blank space but be careful not to trim too much natural gaps between words and sentences. You don't want to cut too much or it will sound robotic or computerized even it won't sound natural. So just keep in mind that you want to keep your audio recording sounding as natural as possible throughout so that it doesn't sound edited so to speak. It will just kind of sound like one perfect recording. So once you've moved through your entire audio file by highlighting and deleting gaps or misspoken words then you should be pretty much good to go with a very basic narrative recording or voiceover. Your audio levels are good. You've trimmed out all of the junk and you are essentially ready to export your audio file for use in a video or for a podcast project. It should be ready to go and all you need to do is save your project. So we will do that in case we need to come back in and fix something later. And then we will also to get the audio file that we can turn in export it by clicking file export and look for mp3 or wave mp3 is a smaller file format than wave. So if space is a concern I would just recommend mp3 and wave is a little bit less compressed than an mp3 file so it will be a little bit larger. But either one should be fine. I'm going to go with an mp3 because it will play on just about any device. And it will walk you through what you want to name it where you want to put it. I'm going to call this Paris 2 mp3 file and just hit save and then it will process for a minute. It's also going to ask you for metadata. A lot of times this will be blank and that's fine. You can leave it blank if there's stuff there. You can leave it there. It's not really going to affect anything. We hit OK and that processes and our file is done. We want to listen to it. I think I put it in my other copy. Yes Paris 2. And then once you have your file just listen to it. Make sure it's what you expect to hear. And then you can turn it in via Jump Drive or UA Box or Google Drive whichever method you prefer. But if you have any questions about basic audio editing feel free to reach out to us at the Sanford Media Center via phone at 205-348-4651 or via email at SMC for Sanford Media Center at UA.edu. And we will be more than happy to help you out. In our next video we're going to show a little bit more advanced audio editing tips for multiple tracks and sound effects and music.