 Hi everyone here is just a tutorial on how to use Adacity. Adacity is a popular open source and free audio editing software. It's compatible with Windows, macOS, and Linux. Here is the download link. You can also download the FF MPEG plugin for Adacity that allows you to import more types of audio files but whenever possible it is best to convert your audio files into mp3 format because that's universal and it doesn't require the plugin. Just note that if you do try to use a plugin it can be a bit tricky to find a version that's compatible if you have a newer mac kind that's got the m1 or m2 processor chip and even on this computer I've been having issues importing certain files. So again if possible try to import convert your files to mp3 format so you don't have to use this plugin. In terms of installing on Windows just once you've downloaded the file it'll be an executable file with the extension .exe just open that file and you'll see this setup wizard it will ask you to choose a language and then you just click next the entire way through. For macOS you download a disk image with the extension .dmg it might be a package file with the extension pkg just open that file and that will be the disk image open that disk image and then you'll see a window like this one over here that will prompt you to drag the audacity app icon into or onto the application shortcut icon and here's just an overview of the sections that I'll be going through. Sections one through nine are really all you need to do your assignment. Sections 10 through 13 are just more considerations to be mindful of when it comes to playback. Okay so section one is the UI overview the menu bar toolbar volume meters the timeline in canvas track layers I'm just going to switch over to audacity now so here is the menu bar you mostly just use the file menu to import files save the project and then export a standalone file when you're done to a lesser extent you might want to use the view menu and maybe even the effect menu I'll go into more detail about those menus. After the menu bar you've got the toolbar there's different sets of tools over here are tools for playback and recording here's a set of selection tools you really only use this top left tool the selection tool here's a set of tools for adjusting the zoom of your project and undoing and redoing actions these buttons you don't really need to worry about over here are two sets of volume levels or meters the one on the left is for microphones if you're recording input over here is for your speakers output both scales are measured in decibels after the toolbar you've got this timeline the all-important timeline after the timeline you've got the canvas where tracks appear so I've already gone ahead and imported a track so a track is this container within the track you can have one or more clips like this one right here so this clip has two waveforms because it's a stereo file stereo recording one waveform is for the left channel the other one is for the right channel and they just happen to be identical and also toward the bottom of the user interface you've got the project rate just leave that the default setting you've got duration counters depending on what you select in this drop-down menu this larger display marks the time stamp of the bookmark currently it's set to zeros and this slider affects the playback speed you don't really need to worry about that okay and that is section one went over the menu bar the toolbar the volume meters the timeline and the canvas track layers the next section are the three line markers to be mindful of know what they do and how to use them the first one is what I call the bookmark it's a black line that appears at the start of the project by default you can click a clip body or use the skip two buttons in the toolbar the skimmer is a white line that only appears when a project is not playing to make it appear you just move your cursor along the timeline and it will appear in the clip body or the track body and the third line marker is the playhead it's a green triangle that's inverted it has a black line it only appears when a project is playing or when it's paused so you just click on a timeline and it will play from that point in the timeline or you can click the play button and the project will always play from wherever the bookmark is sent so just to see that in audacity here's the bookmark by default like I said you can click anywhere in the body of the clip to set it you can also click anywhere in the body of a track layer to set it okay and here's the skimmer in action I'm just moving my time the cursor along the timeline you can see the skimmer in the body of the clip and over here in the body of the track the playhead I will just pick a spot right here where it's not so loud so click on the timeline and it will play and if I set the bookmark here at the beginning again you can use a skip to start set it at the start or skip to end to set it at the end of your project so let's just set it to the start and I'll click play and that is section two the three line markers the bookmark the skimmer in the playhead tip is to always be mindful of where the bookmark is located because it is pretty important for all the various functions section three playback controls pause play and stop keyboard shortcut for pause is p keyboard shortcut for play is spacebar the pretty intuitive but just know the nuances among the three buttons switching over to addacity play button as I mentioned will always play the project from wherever the bookmark is set and the pause button will freeze the playhead at its current position and if it's paused it will unfreeze it so again the play button does not function as a pause button and the stop button is important because it allows you to actually select clips to do editing so you can't essentially you can't edit if the project is playing or even while it's paused so get into the habit of before you want to select a clip any clip click the stop button so that's section three pause play and stop section four selecting clips there's two ways to do it you can single click the head of a clip that's the part of a clip that has the title bar or you can double click the body of that clip that's the section that has the waveforms so to demonstrate let's say I want to select this entire clip single click the head and it's highlighted or I can just double click anywhere within its body again which is the part that is not the head so two different methods do the same thing so that's section four selecting clips section five moving clips so there's two ways to move clips around but they each have different situations that you'd want to use them in there's dragging so that's basically you drag a clip by its head left and right within its current track but you can only drag it it as far as any neighboring clips allow the second method is cutting and pasting you cut it select a clip cut it and then you can paste it anywhere within the existing track or in a different track as long as there's enough space so you need to be mindful of the space where you want to paste the clip into in some cases you might have to drag neighboring clips out of the way okay so to demonstrate that I'm just going to briefly import another version of this mp3 file okay as you can see by default every file that you import will go into its own track layer so I'm just going to use the zoom out function tool again here's the dragging method you just click and drag a clip by its head you can drag it left and right but only as far as any neighboring clips allow okay and let's say I want to move this clip into the first track so first I need to select that clip then I'm going to right click anywhere within its body to bring up this action menu I can select cut or use the keyboard shortcut control x on a windows command x on a mech cut and then I need to set the bookmark at the spot where I want that clip to go so I'm just going to click here again just be mindful where the bookmark is located and I'm just going to right click anywhere within the body of this track layer and then in the action menu either click paste or use the keyboard shortcut control v on windows or command v on mac and then from here I can drag it into place and for any unused tracks track layers you can always click the x button in the track control panel to remove it so that's section five moving clips by dragging left and right and by cutting and pasting section six trimming clips there's two ways to do that you can split a clip and then delete the uh resulting an undesired sub clip you can also drag the end the edges of a clip if you just want to trim the beginning or the end of that clip so I'll demonstrate that um the split and delete so let's say I want to split this clip here so I'm going to set a bookmark by clicking its body let's say right here is good and then from here I can right click anywhere within the body of this clip to bring up the action menu and I can either click split clip or use the keyboard shortcut control eye and windows command eye on mech that creates a split um let's say I want to do that again you can repeat as many times as you want so let's create another split so I click to create a bookmark right click on the body anywhere and select split clip and if this is the undesired portion or sub clip just select that clip and then on the keyboard press either delete or backspace to remove it the other option is dragging the starting or beginning edge of a clip so let's say I want to trim uh the end the end of end of this clip so I just it's hard to see but you need to move your cursor to the edge but it has to be positioned between the clip head and the top of the nearest waveform once you do that you'll see the double sided arrows at that point just click and drag the edge toward the other side inward it is uh finicky if you put the cursor anywhere else the double sided arrow won't appear in so you won't be able to trim so it's got to be in this little narrow window let's do so and if you want to decide like if you want to listen to a clip to hear where you want to clip um you can just play and then click the pause button to freeze the playhead at that spot and then you can click on the play heads vertical line to set the bookmark there or close to it and you can then use the bookmark as a guide as to where you want to drag the edge to or where you want to split the clip you might need to zoom in let's see here okay there you go and then I can right click anywhere in the body to split this clip okay and that is section six trimming clips section seven play monitoring volume so whenever you're doing playback you want to obviously listen but maybe even it's more important to watch the volume meter specifically the peaks that are indicated by blue lines within the volume meter so the volume goes from left to right um once it gets to the minus 12 decibel mark it's it's green but beyond that it turns yellow and then once it gets beyond uh the minus six decibel mark that portion is red so the ideal peak levels for primary or foreground audio is really minus 12 decibels and to maybe even as high as minus six decibels but any anything louder than minus six decibels will clip and it will might sound distorted so I'm just going to play it here okay we're watching here it's actually not bad um but this this part here toward the end I can tell it's a bit louder so let's play you can see here yeah this section does peak well beyond the minus six decibel mark okay so the next step uh section eight adjusting volume so let's say you do need to decrease or even increase the volume there's two ways you can do it they're both um they serve different situations so one is to normalize the decibel level of a given clip so basically you set uh a cap for the volume level using the effect menu essentially the other method is to use the track gain the universal um gain adjustment for that track in all clips within it it's different from this method the normalized clip method because what you were doing here is you're just changing all the clips and attract by a certain decibel amount whereas here you're setting a cap to a specific decibel level so I'll demonstrate that let's say we want to normalize this particular clip and I can't select it because project is paused so I'm going to stop it then select this clip by single clicking its head then opening the effect menu and then the volume and compression submenu I'm going to select the normalize function and this pop up window appears there's a section normalize peak amplitude two and it's checked and in this text field let's set uh the cap or the max peak amplitude to minus 12 decibels and what that will do is it will tell the software to increase or decrease the volume of this clip as needed so that its peaks are never greater than the value that I set which is minus 12 decibels in this case so you I can click apply or I can click preview I'm going to go ahead and do so and again we're going to watch this uh output volume level meter so the short preview and you can see the two different line markers one for each channel which is fine if there's a discrepancy don't worry uh it really depends on your recording but you can see it here that the the furthest the loudest peak is just essentially at minus 12 decibels so I'm going to click apply and the waveform adjusted accordingly it changed accordingly and that's one way to do it uh this normalize method is something you have to do clip by clip okay um whereas the gain method gain method here in the track controls panel this minus and plus slider uh it will affect the entire track and any and all clips within it so again by default the gain is set to zero so that reflects the change to the volume so right now it's at its baseline I can increase or decrease the gain again so essentially if it's for example minus five decibels that means I'm changing the volume of every clip in this track by minus five decibels I'm decreasing it by five decibels again this is a more of a quick way to make a universal change to the clips within a track but it doesn't guarantee that all the tracks will be at around the same volume okay and that is section eight section nine um saving a project and exporting a project so be sure to save often so open the file menu open the save project sub menu and then select save project and you get this warning save project is for an audacity project not an audio file for an audio file that will open in other apps use export so it's pretty clear there so I'm just going to click okay and uh let's save it to the desktop I'll just call it test tutorial tutorial so I have an audacity project file I can reopen it to continue editing I can copy it and save it to external hard drive and then copy it onto another computer and continue editing when it comes time to exporting like submitting your assignment you want to go to open the file menu open the export sub menu and then select export as mp3 and then here you just select a location and name to save the file to select tutorial and it creates a standalone file in the standard mp3 format and that's what you submit and you can hear you can open that file outside of audacity and it's taking a bit longer because the track the project is longer um but your project will be a maximum of 90 seconds so in reality your project will be around here the 130 mark okay and that's section nine section 10 11 12 and 13 are really just more optional just be mindful uh playback looping to set up playback loop range you just click and drag a section on the timeline by default it's shaded blue that color lets you know that the loop is active so if you ever click play and the playhead gets the end of the loop range it will automatically go to the start of that loop range and it will continue playing until you either click pause stop or turn off click the loop on off button to toggle you can also right click on the loop range to open the action menu and then select clear loop again you probably don't need to do it but if for example you find that your project is looping and you're not sure why you might have accidentally set a loop range so that's section 10 playback looping section 11 playback speed the setting so by default set to 1.00x that's normal speed that slider is here at the bottom of the UI I mentioned it earlier you probably don't need to speed it up or slow down your audio but if you find that it's slower or faster than you expect again you might have accidentally changed the playback speed so check here if that is the case that's section 11 playback speed section 12 selected playback there's the mute and the solo button in the control panel for each track here's the mute button and the solo button for this particular track so the mute button will mute the entire track that affects any and all clips within it solo button is really more if you have multiple track layers solo button is kind of the opposite it will mute every other track that you have in your project besides the one that you have currently selected so that's section 12 selected playback section 13 panning audio that is controlled here this left right slider within this track control panel so you can adjust which side which speaker the audio plays from again most people won't use it but let's say you have a clip that you want to be louder on one side because that's how you experience that sound that's really the only case when you might want to change it from the center position so that's section 13 panning audio and here's just an overview of what we've discussed yes UI overview remember there's the menu bar toolbar timeline canvas with track layers and clips within those track layers there's an information panel at the bottom the three line markers are the bookmark make sure you know where that is at all times there's a skimmer and the play head in terms of playback controls there's pause play and stop remember that pause freezes and unfreezes the play head along the timeline the play head will always play from wherever the bookmark is set the stop button is necessary because you have to stop a project in order to actually select any clip to do any editing selecting clips the two methods are to single click the head of a clip or double click its body in terms of moving clips you can drag a clip by its head left and right but you can't you can't drag it across tracks to do that you have to use the cut and paste method to move a clip to a different track or before and after other clips for trimming clips again you can use the split and then delete method to delete the resulting sub clip you can also drag the extreme edge of a clip inward but you have to position the cursor in a fairly precise narrow area in terms of monitoring volume make sure you always watch the volume meter pay attention to the blue peak markers ideally you want them to be around the minus 12 decibel mark it's better to be a little bit lower or to the left of that mark but you can go as high as the minus 6 decibel mark in terms of adjusting volume I showed you how to use the effect menu specifically the volume compression sub menu and the normalize function you can also use the gain slider in the track control panel although that's that's more of a universal and more of a quick fix solution and saving exporting make sure you save your project regularly regularly and then when you're ready to submit your assignment use the export function and then over here just kind of things to consider if you find that the playback is atypical when you're listening to your project just look for a loop range you might have set check the playback speed and then these last two options just more optional and that's it for the tutorial thanks so much for listening and hope you found it useful