 This video is brought to you by the University Libraries Sanford Media Center located on the second floor of Gorgas Library. In this video we're going to dive into a little bit more advanced editing tips and audacity for multiple tracks, music, sound effects, things like that in case you have, you know, multiple audio recordings that you need to mix together for your audio project. Be it for a podcast or a video voiceover or audio narrative essay, it doesn't really matter. Whichever audio project you have, we're going to cover how to handle that. So we've already covered in the previous video basic deletion of parts of audio recordings and adjusting your levels and exporting that recording. But what if you have multiple recordings that you need to edit and put together? Let's say you've got multiple group members in your audio project and you need to splice together several individual recordings. There's a lot of ways to do that. So let's just dive right in. I've got my original Wikipedia Paris recording that we talked about in the previous video. So let's say we have other tracks from other people and we need to splice those together to get, you know, a finished audio project done. So what we'll do is get all of our audio recordings together. And again, I recommend, you know, editing a copy of those recordings just in case. It's better to work with copies than your originals just so you don't accidentally lose any data. So I've got lots of things here. I'm going to go ahead and chunk in. Actually, I'm just going to make a copy of this track and let's see. We'll open a new track and I'm just going to paste it in here as if it were someone else's audio recording. Okay, so let's say you've got a podcast and you've got multiple recordings from other group members and you need to put those together in a way that, you know, makes it sound like a single recording or, you know, any other type of multiple track audio project that you may have. So I've got this audio here and obviously you're not going to want people talking at the same time. So you may need to shift things around. And one of the great things about Audacity is that you can cut and paste. And that's as easy as just highlighting a section that you want to put somewhere and then hitting Edit Copy and pasting it where you need it. You can put it, you know, in the original track here at the top if you'd like. Edit Paste and it just pasted in what you cut and pasted from the other track. You can do that throughout your entire project and just work on one track if you really want to. But again, it's not going to hurt to use multiple tracks as many as you need. So one sort of special, you know, kind of disclaimer to that is that if you have a mono track versus a stereo track you cannot cut a mono track into a stereo track. And I'll show that to you real quick. I'm just going to put in a stereo track like this music file. And you'll notice it's stereo because it has two tracks instead of one like this original recording. So if I try to copy a piece from the stereo track, Edit Copy and paste it into this mono track, it's not going to work. It gives you this error message. Copying stereo audio into a mono track is not allowed. And that's because there's two tracks here. You can't put two tracks into one track. So I'll show you kind of a workaround for that. And that's just by using multiple tracks. Like right now we have three tracks here, two of which are mono tracks and one of which is a stereo track. Which, you know, that just means the top track here plays it out of the left ear. The bottom track plays out of the right ear. That's a pretty standard stereo track. Mono does the same thing, but it plays the exact same track out of both ears. So it's not going to hurt no matter what you have. A stereo or mono track, it doesn't really matter. So what you need to do to organize your project, if you do have a mix of stereo tracks and mono tracks, which you may, the more sound files you have in your project, it's very likely that you're going to encounter this. So instead of cutting and pasting, what you need to do is organize sort of in order your audio files. So let's say this top track here is my vocals. And let's just say for example that this bottom stereo track is, you know, another group member's vocals and they just happen to record in stereo, which is fine. So obviously I can't cut and paste that. So how do I get that organized? Well, you just shift it down in place. And you do that by grabbing this time shift tool. It's these double arrows. And you just move the track down wherever you want it to be. Let's say I want this stereo track of my group member talking and I want it to start, you know, at the end of my vocal recording. I would just shift it down until it's beginning, lines up with the end of my vocal recording. And you have to kind of stretch out your window and scroll around to see everything. You can also just zoom out a lot. It makes it easier to see. But you can do this multiple times. You might end up having stuff going way out here to the right-hand side. And that's fine. But instead of copying and pasting, you just shift stuff around wherever you need it to be. And you can do that super easily just across the board. But just keep in mind that if you have light tracks, mono tracks, or multiple stereo tracks, you can copy and paste into those to keep from having like 10 or 12 tracks going all the way down your page. But I'm just going to open several more blank tracks of different types just to show you what it might look like for you. Okay, so I've got multiple tracks here. You can have as many as you want. It doesn't really matter. And then you just grab your envelope tool and shift stuff around. Just bear in mind that everything plays left to right. And position everything where you want it in order. It's kind of like putting a puzzle together. And like in our original video, Basic Audio Editing, you will want to go through all of your audio tracks and monitor the audio level. Let's go back to our default tool here. Looks like the uppercase I. And let's see how that plays. City in the world after Singapore. I'll get closer to the end there so you don't have to listen to all that. Blow and Geneva. All right, so this track is muted. I don't know why it's grayed out here. Let's see. There we go. So let's try that one more time. Blow and Geneva. So just pretend this music track is another person starting to talk for their bit of the audio project. So it starts right after my vocal ends. And that lines up just fine. But you'll go through, you know, change your audio levels by either doing it globally with this slider or again just highlighting what you want. And then going up to Effect, Amplify. And changing that slider. And once you've done that for now, all of your tracks, you've adjusted the audio levels so that none of them are above this negative 12. You are ready to, you've got everything organized in the order that you want. But what if you want music or sound effects? Well, I recommend that people use the BBC Sound Library, which is free. You can just Google BBC Sound Library. And it will take you straight to that. Sound Effects Library. Let's see, BBC Sound Effects, let's see. Yeah. BBC Sound Effects Library. And there's thousands of free sound effects here. You can listen to a preview of it. All right, that's an engine. You just hit download and it's going to have you accept the very basic terms of use. These are pretty fair, you know, open, licensed. I just agree to that and save the file. And then you can use it in your audio project. For background music, if you want some free music, I recommend the Free Music Archive. And you can just Google Free Music Archive. And it should pop right up. And we're just going to go and search FMA for Free Music Archive. You can search by genres if you're looking for a specific type of music. Let's take a preview of one of these. It's a little too noisy for me, but find one that you like and just hit the download arrow. And then to use it or to download it, you want to right click on the play bar here. And then hit save audio as. And just save that to your machine. And you will import that into Audacity just like any other audio file. But once you've got your music in, one of the big things with music is you obviously don't want it playing loudly while you're talking. So here's my music file. Let's see what that sounds like if I don't adjust it. I'm just reading a little bit off of a Wikipedia page. So it's too loud for having on while voice is on. So you can, since it's music, you can globally just turn it down by grabbing the slider and turning it down. Paris is the capital and most populous city of France with an estimated... Still a little high. I'm going to bump it down a bit more. 148,271. Alright, let's see what it sounds like when it's louder down here in the middle. 8 billion in 2017. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, worldwide cost of living... That sounds pretty good. It's not too loud. But you just have to play with that until it gets to where it sounds good to you. Of course, without going over that negative 12 because you don't want any peaking or clipping. And that's pretty much it for adding music. You might want to do a fade in and there's several ways to do that. You can just highlight the area that you want to fade in like that and hit effect fade in. And it will just automatically apply that fade in and you'll see that it shrunk the beginning part of that audio where I've got it highlighted. I'm going to undo that just so you can see it. And then I'll do it again. Now watch that area and you'll see it shrink. And that's a nice automatic fade in. I'm going to record my voice reading a little bit off of a Wikipedia page. Paris is real subtle so you might have to play with how long you do it, how big of an area you select for your fade in. To do a fade out, same thing. You just go to the end, highlight the end of your music and hit effect fade out. And that shrinks it just like we saw previously. And we'll take a listen to that. 2018, Paris was the second most expensive city in the world after Singapore and the head of Zurich, Hong Kong, Oslo and Geneva. So you can hear the music fade out. Again, it's still pretty subtle because I already had the music playing pretty low in the background anyways. But that's really all there is to it. If you need to split a clip to help make moving things around or copying and pasting easier, you can just move your default selection tool to the area that you want to sort of split or cut. And then hit, let's see, edit, clip boundaries, split. And that now has made this dark line here. And then I can grab my time shift tool and move that piece around to wherever I need to. Let's say I had a group member saying something important and I wanted to put that there. I could shift this down and copy and paste it in there if necessary. Or bump it right back up and it's like the split never even happened. But that lets you, you know, move all of your puzzle pieces around so that you can organize it in the way that, you know, best makes sense to you and to your project. Okay, so one of the last things I'm going to cover is getting rid of background noise. So I'm going to zoom in here. Background noise is generally these little bitty blips that you see on the flat line. You'll see a couple right here. Generally it's, you know, just the hum of electricity in your house or whatever your recording environment was. Let's take a listen to this background noise. Let's mute this other track. I'm going to solo this track out so auto-mute everything else. And let's listen to that. All right, so you can hear me clicking a little bit. So we're going to try and get rid of that. So what we can do is highlight this dead space and then go up to effect noise reduction. And we have to teach Audacity what noise is. So that's why we highlighted this quiet section and we're going to hit get noise profile. And then I'm going to highlight the whole track. You can double click in here, but if you have split clips, it's only going to select the entire clip you're currently on. But if you click over here in the blank area on the left side, it will highlight the entire track. And we'll hit effect noise reduction. And we've already gotten our noise profile, so I'm just going to apply it now. And these defaults are usually fine. You shouldn't have to play with these, but you can if you want to. We'll see if that reduced some of the background noise. You can still hear the clicking a little bit, but these areas right here are so flat that you don't hear any just air conditioning hum or electricity hum. So that sounds pretty good and it applied it across the entire track. So that should get rid of basic background noise. If you've got a dog barking in the background, a loud truck or motorcycle driving by, that's going to be really, really hard to get rid of, if not impossible. So you want to be just really mindful when you're recording to pay attention to those background noise and start over or just pause for a while until it's gone and then continue on so that you can just cut that part out later. All right, so we've got rid of background noise. We've got our music. What about sound effects? I hear a lot of crime podcasts that have sound effects in it. So let's add some sound effects and it's just as easy as adding any of these other audio files. So I'm going to unclick solo there so all of my tracks are blue or live again. And then I'm going to add a sound effect. Let's see. I just downloaded a dog barking as an example and I'm going to drag it into the stereo track. And like we did with everything else, we just grab our time shift tool and move it to wherever we want it to play in our audio project. Let's say we want it to play, you know, right about here. And let's take a listen to it. I'm going to solo it and go back to my default tool. All right, it's a little quiet. So first thing I'm going to do is bring the level up a little bit. And since it's just one little sound effect, I'm just going to use the global slider over here. And we can trim some of that fat off at the end. Just highlight it and delete. Maybe get rid of that first little bark. Highlight, delete that. Let me just make sure it's positioned where we want. And you can do that throughout your project as many sound effects as you want. As much music as you want, wherever you want. You can move it again with just the time shift tool and position anything exactly where you want it. And everything sounds the way that we want. We've got all of our vocals cut up and positioned where we want. So we're pretty much done now. So I would listen to the whole thing, make sure it's what you expect. And here's a really important pro tip. A lot of times I'll see people, they'll forget to unmute their tracks. If I went to export this file right now, it would only export this active track, which is the dog barking. And I would have several minutes of dead space on either side, which would not be what you would want, obviously. So make sure you un-solo any tracks and that all your tracks are active in blue. And then you are good to go for export. And you just click File, Export Audio. And I'm going to pick MP3 again because it's a smaller file and it will play on just about any device. Name it whatever you want. Make sure you know where it's going. And it's going to ask for metadata again. You can ignore that. But what this does when you have multiple tracks is it essentially smashes them all down into one. Or one normal stereo track, kind of like this one right here. And that's what you want. It's easy to listen to. And after a few seconds, you are done. And just remember to save your project file before you close. And then you want to go find your file and make sure it's what you expect it to be. Listen to it. And make sure that it's all of the tracks and sounds and music are in there and playing. And then you're good to go to turn that in via Google Drive, UA Box, whatever method you prefer. And that's all there is to it. And if you need to come back later, you will still have your Audacity project file, which you can reopen as long as you still have your other sounds. That's all of that information about your edits and about the changes you made to your audio files in this data folder that it creates, which can't do anything by itself. So that's why it's really important to have your Audacity project file, all of your original sound files, and the data folder that Audacity creates. It needs all of that to be able to reopen where you were so that you can make changes and then just re-export. So make sure you keep everything. And again, that's why I definitely recommend keep everything in a folder. Just title it for your project and you are good to go. So you've got your finished file and you are ready to turn that in. If you have any questions about your audio project, feel free to reach out to us at the Sanford Media Center via phone at 205-348-4651 or via email at smc at UA.edu. Thanks for watching.