 Hello, I'm Tony Vincent and I'd like to take a few minutes to show you how to use Audacity. Audacity is widely used software for recording and editing audio. It's widely used because it is free and open source software that runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux computers. It's fairly easy to use and after watching the screencast you'll know all you need to know to get started using it. Actually, the most difficult part might be downloading and installing the software. Audacity is absolutely free. If you run into a site that asks you to pay, you've clicked on the wrong link. So you go to audacity.sourceforge.net and download the stable version for your computer and install it. Also on the download page, you'll want to download the LAME MP3 encoder. Because Audacity is open source, it can't include MP3 encoding because of software patents. We have to go to a third party source to get the free MP3 encoder. Download the LAME MP3 encoder to your computer. After downloading, you'll want to keep it somewhere handy like your documents folder. We'll need it at the end of our project. It's best if you connect your microphone before launching Audacity. I like USB microphones best, headset microphones in particular. Audacity will work with any kind of audio input that your computer recognizes, like built-in microphones, those microphones that are just a stick, and headsets. Mac computers don't work well with non-USB microphones, so that's something to keep in mind. After launching Audacity, I suggest making one change to the preferences. You only have to do this once on your computer, but it could save you a lot of headache later. In the preferences, click on the File Format tab. And then the first option says, when importing uncompressed audio files into Audacity, change it to the first option. Make a copy of the file before editing. Like the option says, it is safer and will prevent your project from losing audio if you move the original sound file. I'm going to click OK to close out the preferences. With the preferences closed, you can see the Audacity controls. The large buttons at the top in the middle should look familiar to everybody who's been living in the past 30 years. Even tape players have had these buttons. Rewind, Play, Record, Pause, Stop, and Fast Forward. You'll also see input and output volume controls. In the top left corner are six tools. You can only select one tool at a time, and actually, I've only used three of these tools, so those are the three I'm going to show you. There's the Selection tool for selecting audio. There's the Envelope tool, which really should be called the Volume Adjust tool. And then there's the Timeshift tool, which lets you move audio back and forth along the timeline. Hopefully, when you click the Record button, your microphone is automatically recognized. Speak into the microphone. You should see waveforms appear in the timeline. Click Stop and skip to the beginning of your recording and push Play to listen to what you just recorded. Your microphone is automatically recognized. Speak into the microphone. You should see waveforms. Click Stop once you've listened and you know that it's recorded. Unfortunately, there are many things that can prevent recording of playback. If you hear no sound, you can check, is your microphone selected in the preferences? Was the input slider moved all the way to the right? Is your system input sound muted? Is the Mute button on your microphone deactivated? All of these things can cause you not to get what you've recorded out or your sound out of audacity. You might need to quit audacity and unplug your mic and then plug it back in and relaunch audacity to solve the problem. Once your mic is working properly, it's important that you speak at the right volume into the microphone. Waveforms shouldn't be too small, otherwise your voice will be too quiet. If your waveforms are too large and are flat on the top and bottom, you are speaking too loudly. This will cause distortion in the recording and won't be pleasant to listen to. Microphones that are just right are large, but don't get clipped off at the top and bottom. Another tip, don't touch or adjust your microphone during recording. Listen to this. That's me adjusting my mic. It sounds loud. The good news is that I can remove that sound with audacity. It's also very easy to remove ums and us and other mistakes. Even though you can remove mistakes, it's best not to make them in the first place. Let me show you how easy it is to take out a mistake. I'm going to press record. I am now recording and um, this is fun. Now I'm going to press stop. Here's my recording. Now I am on the selection tool and the selection tool works a lot like the selection tool does in Microsoft Word. I can click anywhere to start the playback. Let me push play. I am now recording and um, this is fun. I notice that the um seems to start about right here. Let me test that one more time. I'll go right before it um, alright, so actually this all is an um. I just select it like I would select text in Microsoft Word and now I push delete or backspace on my keyboard and it's gone. Let's have a listen. I am now recording and this is fun. The mistake is gone. You can't even tell that it was there. I'm going to record some more. I click record. Audacity will be a great tool to use in my classroom. I press stop. When I press record, it put my recording on a new track. When I go back to listen to it, here's what it sounds like. I am now recording. Audacity will be a great tool to use. I'm going to press stop. I need to adjust these clips so they're not overlapping and that's where I'll use the time shift tool. I'll click the time shift tool and now it lets me click hold and drag to move the clip around. If I move it about there and then I can go back to my selection tool and choose to play from this spot. This is fun. Audacity will be a great tool to use in my classroom. Those are two tracks. Each track so I can keep them straight. I can click name and I can name the track. Click OK. Then I can also name the second track to keep my tracks separated. If a different speaker is on each track, you can change the volume level up and down. If somebody is too loud or too soft. But there are times where you don't want these both on separate tracks. You'd like them combined onto one because having two tracks just doesn't make sense. I can mix them together into one track by selecting, just dragging my mouse around over it. I selected the waveforms and under project I choose quick mix. And voila. Now it's on one line. You will notice that I've lost the name that I had given the track. And now it's all in one and easier to keep track of. It sounds exactly the same but visually now they're all on the same track. Let me show you effects. First I select some waveforms to where I want to add an effect. And then under the effect menu there's lots of different things I can do. The ones you will probably most interested in are echo and pitch. Let's make this an echo. Now you won't know this until you experiment with it with the delays, but I like less than a second. It seems like .2 for both of these numbers work out well. I can press preview. I am now recording. Ha! That sounds great. So I click OK. It takes a moment and now I can press play. I am now recording. And this is, and the part that I selected is echoed. Now that's going to be a permanent part of your recording. You can always do edit and undo echo to remove it. But if you go ahead and do other things, save your file and come back to it later, you will not be able to take the echo off. Besides echo, let me highlight it and show you another effect. And this is change pitch. We can change the pitch to be higher. It's preview. I am now recording. Ha! Sounds great, doesn't it? Or I can make it lower. I am now recording. I choose what I want. I click OK. The waveform is slightly changed and when I play it, I am now recording. And this is the part that I selected now has the effect. It's easy to bring in audio, like sound effects and music. Audacity can import mp3, wave and aiff files. You can download sound effects and music from copyright friendly sites like soundsnap.com. I have downloaded a musical loop from soundsnap.com and saved it to my desktop. A musical loop is a short audio clip that is designed to be played over and over again. That way you can make the loop last for as long as you need it to. You can bring in an audio file by selecting import audio from the project menu. I've already downloaded a musical loop from soundsnap.com. I select it and now you can see it appear on a new track. It's a stereo track, so it appears twice, but don't let that confuse you. Let's play. I am now recording and this is fun. So a couple things. First, you don't want your music to overpower your voice. I think that I want my voice to start after the music has gone for a while. So I move that down to about four seconds of music. Then perhaps the music can be quieter, so I can bring its volume down on its own track. But perhaps I want the music to start out loud and then get quieter when I start speaking, but still play in the background. I need that loop to be longer. So to make it longer, I choose a selection tool. I highlight it. Then from the edit menu, I click copy. Then I just click somewhere after my clip and select edit and paste. Voila. I've made it longer because it's a musical loop. It'll sound good repeated over and over. So I'm going to paste it again and that looks like enough. Now, since it is actually three different pieces put together, it'll act as one with the move tool, but since it's three different pieces put together, I want to do a quick mix on it. If I don't do a quick mix before this next step when I adjust the volume, I'm going to have to adjust the volume on every individual piece that I've pasted altogether. So I choose project and quick mix. You brought the sound file down a little bit in size because I had adjusted the volume earlier. Now, I want to start out loud. But then when I start talking, I want it to get quieter. To do that, I use the envelope tool, but remember it really should be called the volume tool. It's like playing a game of connect the dots. I click where I want it to go down to make a dot and then I kind of click before it for another dot. Then I go back to the first dot and bring it down. Making it smaller represents the volume being less. And then let me click the selection tool. We'll start playing from right here. I am now recording and this is fun. Audacity will be a great tool to use in my classroom. So as you can hear, we start out loud and it goes softer because I use that envelope tool. At the end, maybe I want it to fade out. I could select this and I can either use the envelope tool and fade it out manually or there's a fade out under the effects menu. Now you can see and hear that the music just fades smoothly out in my classroom. Like usual on a computer, you should save early and save often. Saving an Audacity saves the project file and also saves an associated folder. You'll need both of these to open your project later or to open it on a different computer. The only software that can play an Audacity project file is Audacity itself. So when you are done with the audio, it needs to be exported. The most popular format is MP3. MP3 is great because it can be played on just about anything that plays digital audio files. MP3s are one-tenth the size of WAV files. That means that your file will be about 1 MB per minute instead of 10 MB per minute with a WAV file. To export as an MP3, you'll need that lame MP3 encoder you downloaded earlier. It'll tell you you'll be mixed down. It'll ask you to save the location of where you want the MP3 file. Again, if you don't have the lame encoder already installed, Audacity will ask you to locate it and it's as simple as that. When I click save, I can give it some tags. These tags will appear in iTunes or other programs that will play the MP3 file. You only have to fill out as much as you want. I click OK and my MP3 is now on my desktop. Audacity has a simple help menu. I suggest reading through the help if you want more information about using Audacity. Audacity is powerful software and I did not show you everything. In fact, if you were to have a recording studio in the 1970s with all of Audacity's capabilities, it would have cost you tens of thousands of dollars. Today with Audacity, the software is free and it can run on the cheapest of computers. Audio is fun to record and can be a great addition to the classroom. Teachers and students can record poetry, book reviews, science and math explanations, podcasts and more. Now that you know how to use Audacity, I hope the project possibilities are bouncing around in that big brain of yours. I'm Tony Vincent. Thanks for watching.