Essential Audacity Basics for Beginners

Welcome to this beginner-level Audacity tutorial. We will learn how to record audio in Audacity and edit those recordings. We will also learn how to edit existing recordings in Audacity. And finally, we will see how we can make those recordings sound better through various Audacity effects. How to record Recording in Audacity is very simple. If you press the red button, the recording will start. You can also press R on the keyboard. However, you have to ensure that you set all the options correctly before recording. Otherwise, your recording quality will be poor. It is very important to get as much good recording as possible. It makes audio editing easier, and the final audio quality depends on how good the recording is. To achieve the best possible recording quality, you have to check four points before recording. The microphone, the recording channel, the microphone input level, and the project rate. I will go through these points one by one. Go to Audio Setup, and you can configure your recording setup from here. You will see all your connected microphones from the recording device. The currently selected microphone will have a tick mark beside it. Select the microphone you want to use for recording. My microphone is connected through a Scarlett audio interface. If I check the recording device from the audio setup again, I see Scarlett has a tick mark beside it. I find this way of selecting a microphone can lead to an issue where you forget to set the proper microphone. I suggest setting the microphone from the device toolbar, where you can always see which microphone is selected. You can find the device toolbar from View, Toolbars, and Device Toolbar. A new toolbar has been added, and you can always see which microphone is currently selected for recording. The device toolbar is one of the most useful toolbars in Audacity. But it is not shown by default. so remember to enable this toolbar from the menu. Sometimes you may not see the microphone in this list though it is connected to the computer. It happens when you attach the microphone while Audacity is open. To solve this, go to Transport and Rescan Audio Devices. The microphone is selected and now set the recording channel. There are two options for recording channels, mono and stereo. For voiceover, mono is fine. For music recording, you might want to select the stereo recording channel. With a stereo recording channel, you can add different effects on the left and right sides of the headphone. For voice recording, you will not need such effects, so select mono to keep things simple. After the recording channel drop-down, you will see another device drop-down. This is the playback device, so you can select it later when you listen to your recorded audio. During recording, it is not important unless you want to monitor your recording live or use the overdub feature for multitrack recording. I will get back to these points later, for now I want to record a simple voiceover. It is vital to set the recording volume level properly. The amount of effort in post-processing heavily depends on the input level of your recording. You can check your recording level or gain from the record meter. Click on the small microphone icon and start monitoring. This way, you can set the proper input level before the recording. Your goal would be to hit minus 12 on this meter during the loudest peaks. Not every spoken word has to hit minus 12 in the meter. Only the louder sounds should be around minus 12. Other spoken words should cross minus 24 and be around minus 18 most of the time. You may have to increase the gain if you are not achieving such a level in the record meter. You may increase the gain through the volume knob of the microphone or audio interface, provided such a knob is there. The recording meter also has a slider that can be used to to adjust the recording level. Though this slider sometimes freezes due to a bug in Audacity, it has frizzed at the moment. Let me show that from the playback meter slider as both work similarly. You can adjust the slider and check if the meter is hitting the right place. When it hits the right place, you set the slider in that position. I keep the recording meter to 100%. You may have to position the microphone differently if you fail to hit minus 12 on the meter even after increasing the gain. You may have to come closer to the microphone, talk louder, or adjust your talking direction. You may ask me why you have to hit minus 12 on the meter. Well, you can hit higher than that, like minus 6. Notice the maximum on this meter is zero. The closer to zero you record, the less headroom you will have in post-production. If you boost some signals in post-processing and it crosses zero, it would result in clipping or distorted sound. Minus 12 is a safe enough value to get enough headroom for post-processing. I would like to increase the size of the meter as it is so important to monitor. You can drag these tools to reposition and extend. You can stop monitoring by clicking the microphone and stop monitoring. The last thing you have to check before recording is the project rate. Though the irony is, you do not need to use a higher project rate than 44.1 kHz. Still, you need to be aware of this project rate. A lower project rate, like 32 kHz or lower, may fail to capture all the good bits of your recording. However, the opposite is not true. You will not notice any difference in audio quality with a higher project rate like 88 kHz or more. Instead, your file size will grow significantly larger. I am skipping the details of why that is, but you should know you can get the best possible recording with 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz. All the amazing MP3s you listen to are 44.1 kHz. Make sure the project rate is 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz, and you are ready. I discuss this point as many beginners wrongly think their bad recording is due to project rate. That is not the case. and when you are not getting a good quality recording, it is more likely your recording environment or equipment, not the project rate. As everything is set, I will press the record button now and let you hear the original recording. Vodacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording, though there are a couple of other softwares which is free, but Vodacity is the easiest one to use. You can practice your audio recording and editing in audacity and when you are used to this software you can move to a more complex software. For Mac you also have the option of GarageBand and if you think about some paid software then you can choose Adobe Audition or iZotope RX. There are lots of software available but whatever software you use you have to choose. to know the basics of audio recording and editing. And to stop the recording, you just press the stop button. The recording is done and what you see are the timeline and waveform. I will get back into the details of those, but the first thing you need to do is to save the project. File, save project, and you will see a warning message as this is not an audio file. You can only open this file in Audacity. not in any other audio playing apps. Click OK. Give your project a name and choose a location to save. You will be able to open this project a later time and work from the last saving point. Remember, Audacity does not have an autosave feature, so you have to explicitly save any change you want to persist. Here is the Audacity project, which is an OP3 file, and I will double-click to open it. The blue things are called waveforms, in audio editing, we mainly edit these waveforms. Waveforms are visual guides of your audio. You can get the idea of which parts are louder and which parts are quieter by seeing the waveform. Editing these waveforms are similar to editing a document editor. I will discuss those in the next section. How to use Audacity interface and edit effectively. The Audacity interface may look confusing if you do not have experience with any editing software. Trust me, Audacity has the most straightforward interface of any audio editing software. Using it several times will make sense of all the buttons you see. This whole thing is called a track, and we only have a single track. The track has an information panel at the beginning and a timeline with a waveform. The numbers you see above the timeline are seconds. If you click the number, the audio will start playing from that second. You can also play audio from inside the track. Click at the point from where you want to play the audio and press spacebar. You can also use the play button. To stop the playing audio, press the spacebar again. In the speaking parts of the audio, the waveform is clearly visible. On the silent parts, the line looks flat. Though the line looks flat here, there is some white background noise. If I play the audio, you can see the noise level in the meter. You may hear the noise if you are listening in a quiet environment with headphones. You can increase the track size vertically by dragging the track from the bottom. You see some dots visible in the silent parts, which are different kinds of noises. If you want to delete some parts in the audio, select it and press delete on the keyboard. To undo any change, press Command Z or Control Z. Deleting something from the timeline alters it. If I delete this piece of audio, everything after it comes forward in the timeline. Sometimes you may want to remove something but want to keep the timeline the same. You can do that from the silence audio selection button. Those audios are gone and the other audios are in their place as before. You can also do the opposite of that. Only keep the selected part and remove the remaining audio. Copy and paste of the audio works with standard shortcuts. Select the parts of the audio you want to copy and press Command C or Control C if you are using Windows. Click to the point where you want to paste and Command V. Undo the last action is Command Z. You can see these shortcuts from the edit menu. Besides these copy paste commands, There is another interesting command, duplicate. Duplicate command duplicates an entire track, and you have to select the track. Otherwise, you will see a prompt asking you to select what to duplicate. You can either duplicate the whole track or parts of the track. I will select the entire track by double-clicking inside it and duplicate it using command D. A new track has been added at the bottom. These two tracks are now at different heights. If I used command shift F, they would have equal heights. Control-Shift-F if you are using Windows. You can get this command in View, Track Size, and Fit to Height. If you have one track, it will take the full height. If you have multiple tracks, the height will be distributed equally. Like Fit to Height, there is another command, Fit to Width. Your track will fit in the width of the Audacity screen. The waveforms are now looking more condensed as all waveforms are on the screen. You can also do these things using the buttons. Zoom toggle alternates between very detailed zoom and condensed zoom. Fit to width buttons are added here, and you can use these instead from the menu or shortcuts. You can zoom in or out in the waveform as much as you want. These help precise editing as the timeline gets bigger. You can also use the mouse scroll bar to zoom in or out while the cursor is inside the track. You can cross out any track using the cross icon. You can rename any track name to remind yourself what is in which track. This is useful when you are working with multiple tracks. You can move around the tracks inside the timeline. A hand icon appears when you place the cursor in the white area. You can drag the track to shift in the timeline. I will cross out this duplicate track and show some features from the top track. You can also rename this. It is basically a clip. A track can have a single clip or multiple clips. You can split a clip. To split a clip, go to a point from where you want to clip. Go to Edit, Audio Clips, and Split. At the splitting point, a bold vertical line appears. A new clip is now created, and I can move these clips around independently. The second clip has the same name as the first clip. I will rename it to Clip 2. I can create as many clips as I need, following the same process. Go to the point of split and split. It is possible to trim clips in Audacity. If you take your mouse pointer to the edges of the clip, the cursor will change to a trimming icon. The trimming icon with pointers on both ends should appear now, but it is not appearing for some reason. Aha! The icon has appeared now. You can trim the edges to make a clip shorter. You can trim spoken parts and expand to get those back. Audacity calls this feature non-destructive editing because the audio is there. Audacity developed this feature in version 3.1, but I am not sure if it is that useful. I want to hear from you if you find this non-destructive helpful. Split can also be done to a new track. However, it does not work the same way as split, where you just set a split point. Splitting to new tracks requires a selection of the audio which you want to take to the new track. I selected this part, and if I go to split new, I will get this audio to a new track. The audio I had selected moved to a new track. Just like other clips, I can move it around. If I want to discard some last changes in editing and go to a previous point, I can undo it multiple times to reach that point. Another way to do it is from history. You will get history from the view menu for the current session only. If you close Audacity and open the same file, a new session starts and history will have records from the current session. An arrow will point at which action of editing you are currently. If some gray lines appear after the current action, that means those actions are undone by your undo command. I want to discard all my changes after duplicating the track. I will select duplicated action and click ok. I will close the duplicated track. If you want to rearrange different toolbars, you can do that. You can drag any toolbar and set it in a new position. You can expand the meters if you want to see the details of the readings. If you mess up the positioning of the toolbars, you can always reset it. From View, Toolbars, Reset Toolbars. Toolbars have some other toolbars that you can check to see if they are useful to you. Some people find the Cut Paste Toolbar handy. A new set of icons was added here, which is the Cut Paste Toolbar. You can now cut or copy any parts with the click of these buttons. Copy-paste of audio waveforms is similar to any document editor. Audacity also has a pair of undo and redo buttons. I prefer keyboard shortcuts for this type of action, but it is up to you which method you prefer. Audacity supports adding labels in different places of the recording. For example, you may want to add a note either here or in both places. Click on the place where you want to add a label. Go to Edit, Labels, and Add Label at selection. A new track will appear with a text input option. Write your note which may help you later in the editing process. You can add as many labels as you want. Label track is not related to the audio recording, so your sound will not be affected. Though you have to remember labels are not locked with the audio track, so deleting something from the track misplaces the labels. If I delete this selection, issue 2 will point to a different place in the waveform. I hope Audacity implements some locking between labels and tracks so that they always remain in sync. That way labels will be much more useful. The workaround for this will be to select both the audio track and label track when deleting something from the audio track. If you select both the audio track and label tracks by dragging and then delete, the labels will be in sync. Adding a label every time from the menu can be tedious, and you can enable type to create a label. Enabling this option will let you add labels by typing inside the label track. For example, If I want to add a label anywhere, I will click inside the label track and start typing. This label can be expanded to point to a range in the track. Drag the handles in the label, and you can adjust the selection. I will close this label track and show you some features of this track information panel. Let's duplicate this track by selecting everything and command D. The solo button makes the current track active and mutes all other tracks. During playback, only the active tracks can be heard. Mute mutes the current track as we expect. After those two buttons, an effects button lets you add real-time effects. Built-in effects in Audacity cannot be used as real-time effects, only third-party effects. I will discuss this in the next section. Right-click inside the track information panel to see some track-related settings. You can see a spectrogram instead of the waveform. The spectrogram shows which audio frequency has how much energy. Though Audacity does not support that much good editing through a spectrogram. If you are using Audacity as an audio learning tool, the spectrogram might help. Otherwise, it is not much useful in terms of audio editing in Audacity. It is possible to see both waveform and spectrogram at the same time. You can also change the waveform color if you do not like the default blue. It is a cosmetic change and has no effects on the sound. If you prefer your waveform in another color, you can change it. I would prefer the default blue. A select button at the bottom selects the whole track. Double-clicking inside the track does the same job. The triangle before the select button is for collapsing the track. If multiple tracks are not fitting well or you want to focus on more than one track, you can collapse other tracks. A gain control slider can increase or decrease the volume of the audio. I will play and adjust, and you will hear the difference. Vodacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording. Though there are couple of other softwares which is free but Vodacity is the easiest one to use. The next slider is the pan slider which adds a panning effect on the left or right side of the headphone. Vodacity is the best free on recording. Though there are couple of other softwares which is free but Vodacity is the easiest one to use. If you are using a headphone, you will understand what I mean. You can repeatedly listen to a part of the audio through the loop button. A marker appears on top of the timeline to denote the loop starting and ending. You can adjust loop selection by rearranging these markers. Audacity is the best free software. I will end this editing basics section by showing the frequency analysis tool. If you want to know which frequencies are making a sound, you can select it and go to the analyze menu. Click on plot spectrum. A beautiful graph appears showing which frequency has how much energy. For basic audio editing, this may not be important. For those who want to dive deep into audio editing, it's a fantastic tool. How to use Audacity Effects There is another major purpose of using Audacity besides recording and editing audio. This purpose is to use audio effects to make it better or different. You can see all the available effects from the effect menu. There are two kinds of audio effects, one fixes some issues and the other makes the audio different. For example, the noise reduction effect removes some noise from the recording. So it is an example of an effect that fixes something. On the other hand, the echo effect makes the sound echoey. So it is an example of an effect that makes the audio different. Audacity has some effects on its own, called built-in effects. You can also use third-party effects with Audacity. All the effects under this line are third-party effects. They are grouped by vendor names. I have installed plugins from MuseFX and iZotope, so I see those names. For you, this vendor name will not be the same. The built-in effects are grouped by what kind of task it does. I will discuss later this at real-time effects and plugin manager. You can change the way effects are grouped from Audacity preference. It is actually a matter of choice and convenience. You can configure different settings for Audacity from preference. On the effects, you will see a sort or group dropdown. You can change from the default to other options, for example, sorted by effect name. Click OK, and you will see the effects are arranged differently. You can now see effects are arranged by name. It makes the effect menu quite big, but the effects are easier to find. It is up to you how you want your effects to be displayed. I will change it back to the default group option. There are many built-in effects, and discussing all those effects will take a very long time. Instead, I will discuss some most used effects. These four effects are the primary effects to make any voice sound better. The order of these effects is also very important to get the optimal result. However, I will not maintain this order to show how the effect works. My goal is to help you understand how an effect work and how to configure an effect. So I will discuss it in an order that is easier for you to understand. But when you use the effects to improve your sound, maintain this order. I will duplicate this track to compare it with the effect applied track. I will rename this bottom track to original and apply the effects on the top track. Double-click inside the top track to select everything inside it. The first effect I will apply is the normalize effect. You will get it in volume and compression. You can think of normalizing as a mechanism for volume control. The loudest part of the audio will get the value you set here. So if you set the peak amplitude as minus 3, the maximum peak in this meter will be minus 3. Let's assume before normalizing the loudest part of the audio is hitting minus 15 in this meter. After normalizing with a peak amplitude of minus 3, the minus 15 will become minus 3, a total increase of 12 dB in the volume. Every part of the audio will increase by 12 dB then. It means your noise will also be increased by 12 dB. I am not going into detail to keep this tutorial beginner-friendly. Once you finish this tutorial, you can check other videos on my channel. which discuss various audio topics in detail. You can get back to the default settings from factory presets for any built-in effects. Keep the Remove DC Offset checked, it keeps the waveform centered around this 0.0 value. However, modern recording equipment does not produce such offset very often, but keeping this checked will not do any harm. I am working with a mono track, so there is no point in checking this last checkbox as that is for the stereo channel. You may wonder what the perfect value for this peak amplitude is. It depends on the situation. The maximum value can be 0, which is the maximum in Audacity meters. It will not take any positive value, and controls become inactive when I enter a positive value. I usually use minus 3 as the peak amplitude. Some platforms do some processing after upload, so minus 3 keeps a headroom for extra processing. Minus 3 makes the audio comfortably audible. Vodacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording. Though there are couple of other softwares which is free. You see, the audio has become louder and is not crossing minus 3 in the meter. Let me find a sample with a higher peak. And if you think about some paid software. It is not getting close to minus 3. Let me find another sample. It looks like this one has the loudest peak. But whatever software you use, you have to know the basics of audio recording and editing. So you see, it is not crossing minus 3 as I had normalized the peak to minus 3. Did you notice the hissing noise has become strong after normalization? There are many causes for hissing noise, such as AC, laptop fan, etc. Even the microphone or audio interface can introduce some hissing noise though we do not hear those during recording. Audacity has an effective noise reduction to minimize this hissing noise. It only works with hissing noise or white background noise. If you have irregular background noise, it is not that useful. To remove hissing noise, you have to select a noise-only part from anywhere in the recording. It can be from the start, middle, or end. The main point is your selected hissing noise is also present in other parts of the audio. So when you reduce that noise, the same noise from other parts also gets reduced. I have already selected a piece from the beginning. Noise reduction is a two-step process. The first part involves introducing that noise to Audacity. With the noise sample selected, go to Noise Reduction. Click on Get Noise Profile. and Audacity will match this noise and remove it in step 2. Select the portion of the audio from where you want to remove that noise. For me, that white noise is present all over the audio, so I will select everything on the track by double-clicking inside it. Go to the noise reduction effect again. You have to set values for these sliders. Remember, there is a cost with noise reduction. The more noise you reduce, the harsher the sound becomes. If you want to know the detail about an effect, Click on the help icon on the effect settings. You will be taken to a detailed documentation of that effect. You can read about what the settings do and how to configure the settings. This documentation is useful for those who want to go deep into audio editing. The noise reduction manual has recommended settings for voice. It suggests a value of 6 for each of the sliders. Let's get back to Audacity and configure those sliders. Set the amount of noise you want to reduce from the noise reduction slider. It is recommended to use 6 though you may need to go higher like 9. The default value of this slider is 12, though I feel it introduces a noticeable harshness. I will set it to 12 for demo purposes. Sensitivity decides how aggressively the noise reduction process will be. If it is set to 0, no noise reduction will happen regardless of what value you set in other sliders. The maximum value is 24, but you can hardly go over 6. Because a too aggressive noise reduction will destroy the audio quality, set the sensitivity value to 6. After noise reduction, a gap is introduced in the audio. Frequency smoothing bands reduce that gap. It helps to reduce the harshness introduced due to noise reduction. For music recording, a lower value, like 2 or 1, is recommended. 0 means no smoothing will be applied. For voice recording, a value of 6 works best. If you want to preview how it will sound, Audacity will play a 6-second preview. To apply these settings, click on OK. The line already looks flat. If I play this, the noise is quite reduced. It is hitting somewhere between minus 36 and minus 39 in this meter due to a mouth noise here. This tiny dot is the mouth noise. The noise other than the mouth noise is quite small. If I delete the mouth noise, you can see it in the meter. I will undo the delete and you should focus more on the noise in the spoken parts. Let's check how the spoken words sound now. Wada City is the best free software for audio editing and recording. Though there are couple of other softwares which is free, but Wada City is the easiest one to use. I feel it is a bit harsh after noise reduction. As I said earlier, a value of 12 makes the sound bit harsh. I will undo the noise reduction from history and do a noise reduction with 6. I already gave Audacity a noise sample in this session, so I can skip step 1. Audacity already has the noise profile, I will set noise reduction to 6. Let's hear. vodacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording though there are couple of I think the sound is okay and no obvious noise is there. There is one effect in audio editing that can make or break a recording, equalization. Equalization, or EQ in short, is the process of editing volume by frequencies. You will get EQ from EQ and filters. The filter curve EQ is the most sophisticated of all these EQ effects and I will use it. You can draw curves of frequency manipulation to EQ your audio. I will reset it to default settings. The green line where we draw the curve is now flattened. You can also flatten the curve from the flatten button. The green line is aligned with 0 dB. In this horizontal axis, you can see the frequencies. Frequency started at 20 Hz and ended at 20 kHz. Every sound we hear has a frequency. A human can only listen to sounds in the frequency range of 20 Hz to 20 kHz. In the vertical axis, you see the dB numbers. You can either increase or decrease the volume of a frequency by dragging the green line to a certain dB. The topic of how sound is distributed over frequencies is quite a large topic. For the sake of EQ, it is good to know that when we hear a sound, it is a combination of many frequencies. In other words, we hear multiple frequencies simultaneously for a particular sound. So different words or different sounds will have a different combination of frequencies. When we increase the volume of some frequencies, we call it a boost. When we decrease the volume of some frequencies, we call it a cut. So how do we know which frequencies to cut or boost? For voiceover, we have certain guidelines. But the actual process of EQ also depends on experience. I will discuss some common guidelines and you will understand them after trying them a couple of times. Audacity has some factory presets and you can go over them to get an idea of what they are doing. For some voices, a treble boost can make the sound crispier. It depends on the voice type that I will get back to shortly. If you analyze the treble boost graph, it starts boosting at 4 kHz and reaches 9 dB at 5 kHz. Then it applies a 9 dB boost on the rest of the frequencies. Boost should be limited to 6 dB because a 9 dB boost may sound unnatural. The small white dots you see are drag points. I can drag the green line from the white points. I will drag the green line from 9 dB to 6 dB. A white dot will appear if I click anywhere at the green line. I can drag it to boost or cut. I am cutting frequencies after 16 kHz. Because for voice, there is nothing after that frequency most of the time. Let's apply this EQ and let's hear how it sounds. Audacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording. It sounds crispier. I will undo the EQ effect from history and apply a more advanced EQ. This advanced EQ is recommended for most of the voices. From factory presets, I will use low roll-off for speech. This preset is slowly rolling off frequencies less than 100 Hz. I will roll off from 80 Hz instead of 100. Because our fundamental frequency can start from as low as 80. Anything less than 80 Hz is not our voice. If there is something beyond 80 Hz, that is probably noise. Rolling off from less than 80 Hz can help to reduce that kind of noise. To add crispiness, I will add the treble boost. I cannot use that from the factory preset, as that will overwrite the modification I already did. Instead, I will add those manually. I have added two dots on 4 kHz and 5 kHz. I will drag the 5 kHz dot to 6 dB. Like last time, I will add a cut after 16 kHz. It is a generic EQ that works for most of the voice. However, some voices produce sibilance or sharp S. For that kind of voice treble boost should be avoided or used with a de-esser. I can save this drawing as a preset so that I do not have to redraw it again next time. Click on save preset and give it a name. I will name it my best EQ1. This preset will appear in user presets. I will apply the EQ. Vodacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording, though there are a couple of other softwares which is free, but Vodacity is the easiest one to use. You can practice your audio recording and editing in audacity and when you are used to this software you can move to We have to learn about another effect, the compressor. A compressor reduces the gap between louder and quieter sounds. This gap is called dynamic range and the compressor reduces it. You will hear the term dynamic range in audio editing frequently. Audacity has two kinds of compressors, downward compressor and upward compressor. Configuring a downward compressor with Audacity is difficult as we cannot read values directly from the meter. It uses the RMS value. which is a bit difficult to read with Audacity. If you check the compress based on Peaks checkbox, an upward compressor will be used. I will use an upward compressor. The Makeup Gain checkbox does a 0 dB normalization after compressing the sound. It does not matter if you keep this checked or unchecked. Because we normalize after compressing, so this checkbox does not matter. You have to measure a value for the threshold and noise floor from your recording. It will vary from recording to recording, so it is important to understand how to measure it. It is good to apply the compressor before normalizing. I will get back to the point of editing before the normalize effect. Now I have exactly the original recording, just duplicated also in the bottom track. If you remember, I said these effects have to apply in this order to make a voice recording better. So I will apply the first two effects and then show you how to measure the compressor's sound levels. I am fast forwarding noise reduction and EQ, as I have already discussed those in detail. I will now apply the compressor in the proper way. I have to measure a value for the threshold. As I will be using an upward compressor, any value less than the threshold will be increased in volume. I will play some parts of the audio and note where it hits the meter. other softwares which is free but audacity is the easiest one to use you can practice your audio recording and editing in audacity and when you are used to this software you can move to it crosses minus 21 most of the time and the peak hits minus 15. the threshold will be a value between these two values i also have to measure the noise floor value it is just over minus 45. So the noise floor value in the compressor configuration has to be greater than this value. I will go to compressor effects as I have all the required readings. I will choose minus 18 as the threshold value. Any recording under minus 18 will be increased in volume and the gap with louder sound will be minimized. I kept the noise floor to minus 35, greater than the noise floor I measured. Minus 35 is also less than any spoken word volume, so it is a safe value. I will choose 4 to 1 as the ratio. Choose a ratio like 3 to 1 or 4 to 1. Too much compression makes the sound unnatural. Audacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording, though there are a couple of other software. The last effect to make the sound better will be normalize. You can practice your audio recording and editing in Audacity and when you are used to this software, you can move to a more complex software. So this is how the final edited recording sounds. There is another effect that works as an alternative to normalize. You will need this effect if your project requires a loudness level on LUFS. You can normalize based on RMS or perceived loudness. Perceived loudness is most used. Some TV channels have a requirement of minus 23 LUFS. Audacity is the best free software. It may sound a bit of a low volume for YouTube videos. For YouTube videos, you can use minus 18 LUFS. You will notice an increase in the waveform as I apply minus 18 LUFS. So far, all my shown effects were on the fixing side. Let's see an effect whose purpose is an enhancement, reverb. From factory presets, you can select different kinds of reverb. You can make the recording sound like it was in a large room or church hall. Different room sizes have different types of sound reflections, and the reverb effect adds that reflection. You can play around with other sliders and check how it sounds. What does it mean the best to be a subscriber? Though there are a couple of other subtleties free, but... It sounded pretty funny. The last effect I will show in this tutorial is truncate silence. It can be a time-saving effect. I will fit the entire waveform onto the screen. Go to truncate silence from the special group. Configure how Audacity will recognize a silence. I configured that if the sound level is less than minus 28 dB for half a second is silence. The action tells Audacity what to do when such a silent part is found. I set to truncate the silence to 0.3 seconds. So whenever my audio has a 0.5 seconds or more extended silence, the silence will cut to 0.3 seconds. You can see the overall waveform got shorter as the silence parts got truncated. Audacity has many other effects, and I advise you to explore those. If you want to know about any effect in detail, let me know in the comment. Real-time effects. Real-time effects are a new feature in Audacity introduced in version You can produce better or excellent sounding audio using real-time effects without knowing the details of audio editing. You will drag the necessary effects and your sound will improve instantly. To add real-time effects, click on the effects tab on the track information panel. You can add real-time effects from the add effect button. Only third-party effects can be used as real-time effects. Audacity did not have good compatible plugins when it first introduced real-time effects. MuseFX has developed some plugins that are both useful and work well with Audacity. Before applying any of these effects, let me show you how to get these effects. Click on Get More Effects, and you will be taken to the Audacity plugin page. You will get plugin-related updates on this page. You can see what types of third-party plugins are available to Audacity. MuseFX plugin suites have several plugins. and click on MuseFX. MuseFX is a collection of useful plugins that dramatically impact Audacity's real-time effect. These plugins are blended with Audacity very well. Before these plugins, real-time effects were not that useful in Audacity. Click on the MuseHub link. You have to install MuseHub Helper and choose the file for your OS. I already have installed MuseHub Helper and I will open it. You will get an icon for MuseHub and go to effects. Remember, this is a helper that lets you download the effects. Click on effects and you will see all the effects available. I already have installed many effects from here and those show a tick mark. You will see a get button and click on get to download the effect. I recommend you install all the effects you see here. After the effect gets downloaded, restart your Audacity. I hope you understand the process of how to get MuseHub effects. Back to Audacity and let's make the audio better using real-time effects. I will duplicate the track for future comparison. As the real-time effects panel is already open, I have to click inside the track where I want to add real-time effects. I will add real-time effects on the top track. There are a couple of effects that make the sound better. The first one is Compress. Compress will reduce the gap between the louder and quieter sounds. MuseFX Compress also makes the sound louder after compressing. The compress effect is added and clicking on it will open the configuration pop-up. Real-time configurations are easy to configure. You will listen to the audio using different presets and decide which one sounds best. You can see a list of compress presets here. You can adjust the knob to set how much of the effect you want. If you feel the effect is doing too much, you decrease the knob. If the effect needs to do more, you increase the knob. You can go back to the defaults from the factory preset. I will play this audio with compress effect and try out different presets. Wada city is the best free software for audio editing and recording. Though there are a couple of other softwares which is free but Wada city is the easiest one to use. You can practice your audio recording and editing in audacity and when you are used to this software you can move to a more complex software. For mac you have for mac you also have the option of garage band and if you think about some. I think the pop vocals preset is working best for this voice recording. I will add another effect. Closing the pop-up does not mean the effect is disabled. The effect is active if the blue icon appears before the effect name. I will add an EQ to make the sound crispier. MuseFX has two types of EQ, ProEQ and SimpleEQ. ProEQ offers a bit of flexibility but also requires some understanding of frequencies. I will add SimpleEQ for now. Like the Compress effect, SimpleEQ has some presets. I will listen to the audio with both effects. I can switch off and on any effect using this switch button. Let's play and toggle between EQ on and off. Vodacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording. Though there are couple of other software which is free, but Vodacity is the easiest one to use. You can practice your audio recording and editing in Vodacity and Hoya anyway. I feel it sounded better when EQ was on. I had only used the presence preset, which is good for voiceover. But I suggest you explore and listen to which sounds best to you. You can change an effect. For example, I want to use Pro-EQ instead of Simple EQ. Pro-EQ has a bit more knobs than Simple EQ. You can adjust those knobs to adjust a particular frequency range. Let's listen with Pro-EQ. Vodacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording. Though there are couple of other softwares which is free but audacity is the easiest one to use. You can practice your audio recording and editing in audacity and when you are used to this software you can move to. I feel it sounded best with pop vocals with pro eq. The sound has become quite better but the noise has also increased. Muse FX does not have a good noise reduction effect at the moment. I hope they will develop one in the near future. MuseFX has a noise gate, but noise gating with strong hissing noise makes the listening experience worse. The noise gate removes noise from quiet parts but comes back suddenly in the spoken parts. Let's listen with the noise gate on and you will understand the issue. Vodacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording. Though there are couple of other softwares which is free, but Vodacity is the easiest one to use. You can practice your audio recording and editing in Audacity and when you are used to this software, you can move to a more complex software. For Mac, you also have the option of GarageBand. If you heard through the headphone, you might find this on and off hissing noise distracting. For noise reduction, I would suggest the built-in noise reduction effect until MuseFX develops something. I will disable the noise gate. I can remove this effect from no effect. I will add a reverb effect which can be used for two purposes. Either it can add a different type of effect on the sound or it can take care of some room reflections. For example, the vocal booth can minimize room sound reflections. Vodacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording. Though there are a couple of other softwares which is free but Vodacity is the easiest one to use. You can practice your audio recording and editing in Vodacity and when you are used to this. Not a big difference, but it removed some of the sound reflections in the room. You can add the same effect multiple times. As I said earlier, reverb could also add a different kinds of sound effects. I will add some sound effects from this reverb effect. Vodacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording. Though there are couple of other softwares which is free but audacity is the easiest one to use. You can practice your audio recording and editing in audacity and when you are used to this software you can move to a more complex software. I hope you understand how to get sound effects using reverb. I will remove the second reverb as my intention is to make the sound better only. At this point, you may be wondering about the waveforms. The bottom track is the original recording, and no effects have been added to it. The top track has three real-time effects applied. But both waveforms look similar. Real-time effects in Audacity do not show the change in the waveform immediately. If I export the track with real-time effects, I will see the changes in waveform. I am exporting this track and will show you what I mean. This is the exported track, and if I drag it into Audacity, you will see the change in the waveform. If I play the tracks, you will see the first and third tracks are the same. It is possible to see the waveform change without exporting, but it has another consequence. Click the track with real-time effects. and go to the tracks menu. Mix and mix and render. You see both the first and third waveforms are the same. Though we can see the change in the waveform, the real-time effects stack no longer appears here. If we want to change the effects we already added, we will not be able to do that. So I will undo the mixing and want to see which effects have been added. During the export I get the sound I am hearing now, so I feel no necessity to mix and render real-time effects in the track. You can rearrange these effects stack. Though I do not hear any difference in rearranging in this way, Audacity may have plans for the future. If you have installed any third-party effects and do not see them in the effects list, check if that is enabled. Go to Plugin Manager from Effect. You can find all the plugins here, both enabled and disabled. These plugins include all the built-in effects from Audacity and any third-party effects. You can enable or disable any plugin. Select the plugin and you will see an enable and a disable button. You can also filter down disabled effects. I have most of my effects enabled. I do not have any disabled effects currently. MuseFX effects will be enabled automatically once you download the effect and restart Audacity properly. Besides MuseFX effects, other third-party plugins can be found on the plugins page. You can check if any third-party plugin is available for your need. Usually these plugins are easy to use than built-in effects. You will need a basic understanding of audio editing to use Audacity built-in effects. With third-party plugins, you can dial some knobs and check how the sound changes. Not every third-party plugin gets into Audacity automatically. You can check the installation process for your OS. MuseFX plugins are easy to install and use. I suggest you spend some time learning how to use MuseFX effects. Multitrack recording in Audacity. Multitrack recording is essential for producing songs or podcasts. It is also necessary for re-recording parts of the voiceover. If some parts of the voiceover need to be re-recorded, you can record that part in another track and replace that part from the main track. Once you finish recording a track, clicking on the record button will start recording after the track. It will be the same track, just a different clip. It is denoted by number 2 of audio track 1. If you mouse over the record button, you will see a keyboard shortcut to record a new track, shift R. However, Shift R will start recording the new track from the last playhead position. If you want to record the new track from the beginning, click at that point to move the playhead, then record. The keyboard shortcut is not the only way to record in multitrack. From the tracks menu, add new track. It can be a mono track or stereo track based on your need. I will choose the mono track. Click inside the track from where you want the recording to start. Click on the record button and the recording will start. I have not muted the top track. So you may be wondering if the top track will be played back during recording. It depends on how to set the overdub. Go to transport and then transport options. I have no tick mark beside the overdub, which means it is off. I can click on it and the overdub will be on. The overdub feature is on now. If I record something, you will hear both the existing track and the recording. I will let you hear the original sounds during the recording. Audio editing. You can practice your audio recording and editing in Audacity and when you are used to this software, you can move to a more complex software. For Mac, you have... I don't find the overdub feature necessary for voiceover recording, so I will turn it off. There is another option after the overdub software playthrough. You will see a headphone input in many microphones. It is for live monitoring. If you want to hear how your recording sounds during recording, you can use this option. I do not use live monitoring, so I will uncheck the software playthrough option. I have said it before and reminding you again. If you do not see your connected devices in Audacity, Rescan Audio Devices can help. I will now discuss an interesting effect, very useful for podcasters. The audio I just dragged to Audacity is a piece of music. Let me expand the tracks a bit. It has become too squeezed after dragging the music track. The voice and music track have similar loudness. It would make it difficult to hear the voice. Using AutoDuck, I can adjust the music track automatically, though it will not work because the music track has to be on top of the voice track. You can see a message asking for the AutoDuck track to be on the top. You can move the track up or down using the track information panel. I can now apply AutoDuck to the music track. I will shift the voice to the right so that some music is played before the talking starts. Before applying auto duck, let's listen to how it sounds together. The music is too loud for the voice. The auto duck will take the music down during the talks. You can set the duck amount, which is minus 12 dB by default. I will apply the default settings. Let's play and listen. After auto ducking, the music becomes low as the voice starts. It is a handy tool for podcast intro and outro. You can also manually adjust the volume from the envelope tool. Autoduck decided where to lower the music. You can set two points with the envelope tool and drag the volume down or up. It enables fine-tuning the volume levels. I think the middle part of the music is already at the low points, so the envelope tool is not doing much. I can show this envelope tool from the part where the volume is much louder. In the end, the music is louder, so let's try the envelope tool here. Select the envelope tool and click at two points. Drag from inside the two points so other audio parts will remain unaffected. I hope you understand how the envelope tool is doing a similar job to Autoduck. Audacity is a powerful tool if you can use it correctly. You will want to get a single track or file from multiple track. Generating a single track from multiple tracks is called mixing. You can find the mix tool in the tracks menu. To mix multiple tracks, you have to select those tracks. I will select both tracks and go to tracks menu. You can combine these get to get a single track. It will have the same sound as when the both tracks were playing. If you want to keep both tracks and mix them into a new track, that is also possible. A new mix track is created at the bottom. To export this mix track, select everything in the track and go to Export. Audacity lets you export your audio in many formats. Wave is a lossless format. that keeps all the audio data. If you need a smaller file size, then you can choose mp3. I usually choose WAV. You have to choose a location and file name, and you can save. You now know everything to work with multiple tracks in Audacity. In fact, you now know everything you need for voiceover or podcast recording and editing. Let me know in the comment if you want to know anything else about Audacity. My channel is full of Audacity tutorials, I suggest you browse through those. If you watch all the Audacity tutorials on my channel, I think you will know all the necessary concepts of professional audio editing. If you can comment on which purpose you use Audacity, it will help me to make future videos. For example, if you are generating an audiobook, I can give specific tips for audiobook generation. If you are using it for podcasting, I can guide you in podcast editing. If you want to generate good quality audio, the first step would be to make sure your recording environment is right. The right recording environment means it is quiet and has no obvious loud background noise. Otherwise, you won't be able to generate as much good sound as you like. Your feedback is very important to make useful videos for you. As I know Audacity a bit, sometimes I do not understand what a beginner can struggle with. If you give me feedback like I should discuss those concept more, then I will better understand what you are looking for. Audacity is a powerful audio editor that can do most of the audio editing tasks for beginners. Even professional voiceover actors use Audacity as it has all the necessary features. It may lack features of some advanced audio editing softwares but still it is a fantastic audio editor. Thanks for watching and see you next.

How to record Recording in Audacity is very simple. If you press the red button, the recording will start. You can also press R on the keyboard. However, you have to ensure that you set all the options correctly before recording. Otherwise, your recording quality will be poor.

It is very important to get as much good recording as possible. It makes audio editing easier, and the final audio quality depends on how good the recording is. To achieve the best possible recording quality, you have to check four points before recording.

The microphone, the recording channel, the microphone input level, and the project rate. I will go through these points one by one. Go to Audio Setup, and you can configure your recording setup from here.

You will see all your connected microphones from the recording device. The currently selected microphone will have a tick mark beside it. Select the microphone you want to use for recording. My microphone is connected through a Scarlett audio interface. If I check the recording device from the audio setup again, I see Scarlett has a tick mark beside it.

I find this way of selecting a microphone can lead to an issue where you forget to set the proper microphone. I suggest setting the microphone from the device toolbar, where you can always see which microphone is selected. You can find the device toolbar from View, Toolbars, and Device Toolbar. A new toolbar has been added, and you can always see which microphone is currently selected for recording. The device toolbar is one of the most useful toolbars in Audacity.

But it is not shown by default. so remember to enable this toolbar from the menu. Sometimes you may not see the microphone in this list though it is connected to the computer.

It happens when you attach the microphone while Audacity is open. To solve this, go to Transport and Rescan Audio Devices. The microphone is selected and now set the recording channel.

There are two options for recording channels, mono and stereo. For voiceover, mono is fine. For music recording, you might want to select the stereo recording channel.

With a stereo recording channel, you can add different effects on the left and right sides of the headphone. For voice recording, you will not need such effects, so select mono to keep things simple. After the recording channel drop-down, you will see another device drop-down. This is the playback device, so you can select it later when you listen to your recorded audio.

During recording, it is not important unless you want to monitor your recording live or use the overdub feature for multitrack recording. I will get back to these points later, for now I want to record a simple voiceover. It is vital to set the recording volume level properly.

The amount of effort in post-processing heavily depends on the input level of your recording. You can check your recording level or gain from the record meter. Click on the small microphone icon and start monitoring. This way, you can set the proper input level before the recording.

Your goal would be to hit minus 12 on this meter during the loudest peaks. Not every spoken word has to hit minus 12 in the meter. Only the louder sounds should be around minus 12. Other spoken words should cross minus 24 and be around minus 18 most of the time. You may have to increase the gain if you are not achieving such a level in the record meter. You may increase the gain through the volume knob of the microphone or audio interface, provided such a knob is there.

The recording meter also has a slider that can be used to to adjust the recording level. Though this slider sometimes freezes due to a bug in Audacity, it has frizzed at the moment. Let me show that from the playback meter slider as both work similarly. You can adjust the slider and check if the meter is hitting the right place. When it hits the right place, you set the slider in that position.

I keep the recording meter to 100%. You may have to position the microphone differently if you fail to hit minus 12 on the meter even after increasing the gain. You may have to come closer to the microphone, talk louder, or adjust your talking direction. You may ask me why you have to hit minus 12 on the meter. Well, you can hit higher than that, like minus 6. Notice the maximum on this meter is zero.

The closer to zero you record, the less headroom you will have in post-production. If you boost some signals in post-processing and it crosses zero, it would result in clipping or distorted sound. Minus 12 is a safe enough value to get enough headroom for post-processing.

I would like to increase the size of the meter as it is so important to monitor. You can drag these tools to reposition and extend. You can stop monitoring by clicking the microphone and stop monitoring. The last thing you have to check before recording is the project rate. Though the irony is, you do not need to use a higher project rate than 44.1 kHz.

Still, you need to be aware of this project rate. A lower project rate, like 32 kHz or lower, may fail to capture all the good bits of your recording. However, the opposite is not true. You will not notice any difference in audio quality with a higher project rate like 88 kHz or more.

Instead, your file size will grow significantly larger. I am skipping the details of why that is, but you should know you can get the best possible recording with 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz. All the amazing MP3s you listen to are 44.1 kHz.

Make sure the project rate is 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz, and you are ready. I discuss this point as many beginners wrongly think their bad recording is due to project rate. That is not the case.

and when you are not getting a good quality recording, it is more likely your recording environment or equipment, not the project rate. As everything is set, I will press the record button now and let you hear the original recording. Vodacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording, though there are a couple of other softwares which is free, but Vodacity is the easiest one to use.

You can practice your audio recording and editing in audacity and when you are used to this software you can move to a more complex software. For Mac you also have the option of GarageBand and if you think about some paid software then you can choose Adobe Audition or iZotope RX. There are lots of software available but whatever software you use you have to choose. to know the basics of audio recording and editing. And to stop the recording, you just press the stop button.

The recording is done and what you see are the timeline and waveform. I will get back into the details of those, but the first thing you need to do is to save the project. File, save project, and you will see a warning message as this is not an audio file. You can only open this file in Audacity. not in any other audio playing apps.

Click OK. Give your project a name and choose a location to save. You will be able to open this project a later time and work from the last saving point.

Remember, Audacity does not have an autosave feature, so you have to explicitly save any change you want to persist. Here is the Audacity project, which is an OP3 file, and I will double-click to open it. The blue things are called waveforms, in audio editing, we mainly edit these waveforms. Waveforms are visual guides of your audio.

You can get the idea of which parts are louder and which parts are quieter by seeing the waveform. Editing these waveforms are similar to editing a document editor. I will discuss those in the next section.

How to use Audacity interface and edit effectively. The Audacity interface may look confusing if you do not have experience with any editing software. Trust me, Audacity has the most straightforward interface of any audio editing software.

Using it several times will make sense of all the buttons you see. This whole thing is called a track, and we only have a single track. The track has an information panel at the beginning and a timeline with a waveform.

The numbers you see above the timeline are seconds. If you click the number, the audio will start playing from that second. You can also play audio from inside the track. Click at the point from where you want to play the audio and press spacebar.

You can also use the play button. To stop the playing audio, press the spacebar again. In the speaking parts of the audio, the waveform is clearly visible.

On the silent parts, the line looks flat. Though the line looks flat here, there is some white background noise. If I play the audio, you can see the noise level in the meter. You may hear the noise if you are listening in a quiet environment with headphones. You can increase the track size vertically by dragging the track from the bottom.

You see some dots visible in the silent parts, which are different kinds of noises. If you want to delete some parts in the audio, select it and press delete on the keyboard. To undo any change, press Command Z or Control Z. Deleting something from the timeline alters it. If I delete this piece of audio, everything after it comes forward in the timeline.

Sometimes you may want to remove something but want to keep the timeline the same. You can do that from the silence audio selection button. Those audios are gone and the other audios are in their place as before.

You can also do the opposite of that. Only keep the selected part and remove the remaining audio. Copy and paste of the audio works with standard shortcuts. Select the parts of the audio you want to copy and press Command C or Control C if you are using Windows.

Click to the point where you want to paste and Command V. Undo the last action is Command Z. You can see these shortcuts from the edit menu. Besides these copy paste commands, There is another interesting command, duplicate. Duplicate command duplicates an entire track, and you have to select the track.

Otherwise, you will see a prompt asking you to select what to duplicate. You can either duplicate the whole track or parts of the track. I will select the entire track by double-clicking inside it and duplicate it using command D.

A new track has been added at the bottom. These two tracks are now at different heights. If I used command shift F, they would have equal heights. Control-Shift-F if you are using Windows.

You can get this command in View, Track Size, and Fit to Height. If you have one track, it will take the full height. If you have multiple tracks, the height will be distributed equally. Like Fit to Height, there is another command, Fit to Width. Your track will fit in the width of the Audacity screen.

The waveforms are now looking more condensed as all waveforms are on the screen. You can also do these things using the buttons. Zoom toggle alternates between very detailed zoom and condensed zoom. Fit to width buttons are added here, and you can use these instead from the menu or shortcuts. You can zoom in or out in the waveform as much as you want.

These help precise editing as the timeline gets bigger. You can also use the mouse scroll bar to zoom in or out while the cursor is inside the track. You can cross out any track using the cross icon. You can rename any track name to remind yourself what is in which track.

This is useful when you are working with multiple tracks. You can move around the tracks inside the timeline. A hand icon appears when you place the cursor in the white area. You can drag the track to shift in the timeline. I will cross out this duplicate track and show some features from the top track.

You can also rename this. It is basically a clip. A track can have a single clip or multiple clips.

You can split a clip. To split a clip, go to a point from where you want to clip. Go to Edit, Audio Clips, and Split.

At the splitting point, a bold vertical line appears. A new clip is now created, and I can move these clips around independently. The second clip has the same name as the first clip.

I will rename it to Clip 2. I can create as many clips as I need, following the same process. Go to the point of split and split. It is possible to trim clips in Audacity.

If you take your mouse pointer to the edges of the clip, the cursor will change to a trimming icon. The trimming icon with pointers on both ends should appear now, but it is not appearing for some reason. Aha!

The icon has appeared now. You can trim the edges to make a clip shorter. You can trim spoken parts and expand to get those back.

Audacity calls this feature non-destructive editing because the audio is there. Audacity developed this feature in version 3.1, but I am not sure if it is that useful. I want to hear from you if you find this non-destructive helpful. Split can also be done to a new track. However, it does not work the same way as split, where you just set a split point.

Splitting to new tracks requires a selection of the audio which you want to take to the new track. I selected this part, and if I go to split new, I will get this audio to a new track. The audio I had selected moved to a new track. Just like other clips, I can move it around.

If I want to discard some last changes in editing and go to a previous point, I can undo it multiple times to reach that point. Another way to do it is from history. You will get history from the view menu for the current session only. If you close Audacity and open the same file, a new session starts and history will have records from the current session. An arrow will point at which action of editing you are currently.

If some gray lines appear after the current action, that means those actions are undone by your undo command. I want to discard all my changes after duplicating the track. I will select duplicated action and click ok. I will close the duplicated track.

If you want to rearrange different toolbars, you can do that. You can drag any toolbar and set it in a new position. You can expand the meters if you want to see the details of the readings. If you mess up the positioning of the toolbars, you can always reset it. From View, Toolbars, Reset Toolbars.

Toolbars have some other toolbars that you can check to see if they are useful to you. Some people find the Cut Paste Toolbar handy. A new set of icons was added here, which is the Cut Paste Toolbar.

You can now cut or copy any parts with the click of these buttons. Copy-paste of audio waveforms is similar to any document editor. Audacity also has a pair of undo and redo buttons. I prefer keyboard shortcuts for this type of action, but it is up to you which method you prefer.

Audacity supports adding labels in different places of the recording. For example, you may want to add a note either here or in both places. Click on the place where you want to add a label.

Go to Edit, Labels, and Add Label at selection. A new track will appear with a text input option. Write your note which may help you later in the editing process.

You can add as many labels as you want. Label track is not related to the audio recording, so your sound will not be affected. Though you have to remember labels are not locked with the audio track, so deleting something from the track misplaces the labels.

If I delete this selection, issue 2 will point to a different place in the waveform. I hope Audacity implements some locking between labels and tracks so that they always remain in sync. That way labels will be much more useful. The workaround for this will be to select both the audio track and label track when deleting something from the audio track. If you select both the audio track and label tracks by dragging and then delete, the labels will be in sync.

Adding a label every time from the menu can be tedious, and you can enable type to create a label. Enabling this option will let you add labels by typing inside the label track. For example, If I want to add a label anywhere, I will click inside the label track and start typing. This label can be expanded to point to a range in the track.

Drag the handles in the label, and you can adjust the selection. I will close this label track and show you some features of this track information panel. Let's duplicate this track by selecting everything and command D. The solo button makes the current track active and mutes all other tracks.

During playback, only the active tracks can be heard. Mute mutes the current track as we expect. After those two buttons, an effects button lets you add real-time effects. Built-in effects in Audacity cannot be used as real-time effects, only third-party effects.

I will discuss this in the next section. Right-click inside the track information panel to see some track-related settings. You can see a spectrogram instead of the waveform.

The spectrogram shows which audio frequency has how much energy. Though Audacity does not support that much good editing through a spectrogram. If you are using Audacity as an audio learning tool, the spectrogram might help.

Otherwise, it is not much useful in terms of audio editing in Audacity. It is possible to see both waveform and spectrogram at the same time. You can also change the waveform color if you do not like the default blue.

It is a cosmetic change and has no effects on the sound. If you prefer your waveform in another color, you can change it. I would prefer the default blue.

A select button at the bottom selects the whole track. Double-clicking inside the track does the same job. The triangle before the select button is for collapsing the track.

If multiple tracks are not fitting well or you want to focus on more than one track, you can collapse other tracks. A gain control slider can increase or decrease the volume of the audio. I will play and adjust, and you will hear the difference. Vodacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording.

Though there are couple of other softwares which is free but Vodacity is the easiest one to use. The next slider is the pan slider which adds a panning effect on the left or right side of the headphone. Vodacity is the best free on recording. Though there are couple of other softwares which is free but Vodacity is the easiest one to use.

If you are using a headphone, you will understand what I mean. You can repeatedly listen to a part of the audio through the loop button. A marker appears on top of the timeline to denote the loop starting and ending. You can adjust loop selection by rearranging these markers. Audacity is the best free software.

I will end this editing basics section by showing the frequency analysis tool. If you want to know which frequencies are making a sound, you can select it and go to the analyze menu. Click on plot spectrum. A beautiful graph appears showing which frequency has how much energy.

For basic audio editing, this may not be important. For those who want to dive deep into audio editing, it's a fantastic tool. How to use Audacity Effects There is another major purpose of using Audacity besides recording and editing audio. This purpose is to use audio effects to make it better or different. You can see all the available effects from the effect menu.

There are two kinds of audio effects, one fixes some issues and the other makes the audio different. For example, the noise reduction effect removes some noise from the recording. So it is an example of an effect that fixes something. On the other hand, the echo effect makes the sound echoey. So it is an example of an effect that makes the audio different.

Audacity has some effects on its own, called built-in effects. You can also use third-party effects with Audacity. All the effects under this line are third-party effects.

They are grouped by vendor names. I have installed plugins from MuseFX and iZotope, so I see those names. For you, this vendor name will not be the same. The built-in effects are grouped by what kind of task it does.

I will discuss later this at real-time effects and plugin manager. You can change the way effects are grouped from Audacity preference. It is actually a matter of choice and convenience. You can configure different settings for Audacity from preference. On the effects, you will see a sort or group dropdown.

You can change from the default to other options, for example, sorted by effect name. Click OK, and you will see the effects are arranged differently. You can now see effects are arranged by name. It makes the effect menu quite big, but the effects are easier to find.

It is up to you how you want your effects to be displayed. I will change it back to the default group option. There are many built-in effects, and discussing all those effects will take a very long time.

Instead, I will discuss some most used effects. These four effects are the primary effects to make any voice sound better. The order of these effects is also very important to get the optimal result. However, I will not maintain this order to show how the effect works. My goal is to help you understand how an effect work and how to configure an effect.

So I will discuss it in an order that is easier for you to understand. But when you use the effects to improve your sound, maintain this order. I will duplicate this track to compare it with the effect applied track. I will rename this bottom track to original and apply the effects on the top track.

Double-click inside the top track to select everything inside it. The first effect I will apply is the normalize effect. You will get it in volume and compression.

You can think of normalizing as a mechanism for volume control. The loudest part of the audio will get the value you set here. So if you set the peak amplitude as minus 3, the maximum peak in this meter will be minus 3. Let's assume before normalizing the loudest part of the audio is hitting minus 15 in this meter.

After normalizing with a peak amplitude of minus 3, the minus 15 will become minus 3, a total increase of 12 dB in the volume. Every part of the audio will increase by 12 dB then. It means your noise will also be increased by 12 dB. I am not going into detail to keep this tutorial beginner-friendly. Once you finish this tutorial, you can check other videos on my channel.

which discuss various audio topics in detail. You can get back to the default settings from factory presets for any built-in effects. Keep the Remove DC Offset checked, it keeps the waveform centered around this 0.0 value.

However, modern recording equipment does not produce such offset very often, but keeping this checked will not do any harm. I am working with a mono track, so there is no point in checking this last checkbox as that is for the stereo channel. You may wonder what the perfect value for this peak amplitude is.

It depends on the situation. The maximum value can be 0, which is the maximum in Audacity meters. It will not take any positive value, and controls become inactive when I enter a positive value.

I usually use minus 3 as the peak amplitude. Some platforms do some processing after upload, so minus 3 keeps a headroom for extra processing. Minus 3 makes the audio comfortably audible.

Vodacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording. Though there are couple of other softwares which is free. You see, the audio has become louder and is not crossing minus 3 in the meter.

Let me find a sample with a higher peak. And if you think about some paid software. It is not getting close to minus 3. Let me find another sample.

It looks like this one has the loudest peak. But whatever software you use, you have to know the basics of audio recording and editing. So you see, it is not crossing minus 3 as I had normalized the peak to minus 3. Did you notice the hissing noise has become strong after normalization?

There are many causes for hissing noise, such as AC, laptop fan, etc. Even the microphone or audio interface can introduce some hissing noise though we do not hear those during recording. Audacity has an effective noise reduction to minimize this hissing noise.

It only works with hissing noise or white background noise. If you have irregular background noise, it is not that useful. To remove hissing noise, you have to select a noise-only part from anywhere in the recording.

It can be from the start, middle, or end. The main point is your selected hissing noise is also present in other parts of the audio. So when you reduce that noise, the same noise from other parts also gets reduced.

I have already selected a piece from the beginning. Noise reduction is a two-step process. The first part involves introducing that noise to Audacity. With the noise sample selected, go to Noise Reduction. Click on Get Noise Profile.

and Audacity will match this noise and remove it in step 2. Select the portion of the audio from where you want to remove that noise. For me, that white noise is present all over the audio, so I will select everything on the track by double-clicking inside it. Go to the noise reduction effect again.

You have to set values for these sliders. Remember, there is a cost with noise reduction. The more noise you reduce, the harsher the sound becomes. If you want to know the detail about an effect, Click on the help icon on the effect settings.

You will be taken to a detailed documentation of that effect. You can read about what the settings do and how to configure the settings. This documentation is useful for those who want to go deep into audio editing.

The noise reduction manual has recommended settings for voice. It suggests a value of 6 for each of the sliders. Let's get back to Audacity and configure those sliders.

Set the amount of noise you want to reduce from the noise reduction slider. It is recommended to use 6 though you may need to go higher like 9. The default value of this slider is 12, though I feel it introduces a noticeable harshness. I will set it to 12 for demo purposes. Sensitivity decides how aggressively the noise reduction process will be.

If it is set to 0, no noise reduction will happen regardless of what value you set in other sliders. The maximum value is 24, but you can hardly go over 6. Because a too aggressive noise reduction will destroy the audio quality, set the sensitivity value to 6. After noise reduction, a gap is introduced in the audio. Frequency smoothing bands reduce that gap.

It helps to reduce the harshness introduced due to noise reduction. For music recording, a lower value, like 2 or 1, is recommended. 0 means no smoothing will be applied.

For voice recording, a value of 6 works best. If you want to preview how it will sound, Audacity will play a 6-second preview. To apply these settings, click on OK. The line already looks flat. If I play this, the noise is quite reduced.

It is hitting somewhere between minus 36 and minus 39 in this meter due to a mouth noise here. This tiny dot is the mouth noise. The noise other than the mouth noise is quite small.

If I delete the mouth noise, you can see it in the meter. I will undo the delete and you should focus more on the noise in the spoken parts. Let's check how the spoken words sound now.

Wada City is the best free software for audio editing and recording. Though there are couple of other softwares which is free, but Wada City is the easiest one to use. I feel it is a bit harsh after noise reduction. As I said earlier, a value of 12 makes the sound bit harsh. I will undo the noise reduction from history and do a noise reduction with 6. I already gave Audacity a noise sample in this session, so I can skip step 1. Audacity already has the noise profile, I will set noise reduction to 6. Let's hear.

vodacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording though there are couple of I think the sound is okay and no obvious noise is there. There is one effect in audio editing that can make or break a recording, equalization. Equalization, or EQ in short, is the process of editing volume by frequencies.

You will get EQ from EQ and filters. The filter curve EQ is the most sophisticated of all these EQ effects and I will use it. You can draw curves of frequency manipulation to EQ your audio.

I will reset it to default settings. The green line where we draw the curve is now flattened. You can also flatten the curve from the flatten button. The green line is aligned with 0 dB.

In this horizontal axis, you can see the frequencies. Frequency started at 20 Hz and ended at 20 kHz. Every sound we hear has a frequency.

A human can only listen to sounds in the frequency range of 20 Hz to 20 kHz. In the vertical axis, you see the dB numbers. You can either increase or decrease the volume of a frequency by dragging the green line to a certain dB.

The topic of how sound is distributed over frequencies is quite a large topic. For the sake of EQ, it is good to know that when we hear a sound, it is a combination of many frequencies. In other words, we hear multiple frequencies simultaneously for a particular sound.

So different words or different sounds will have a different combination of frequencies. When we increase the volume of some frequencies, we call it a boost. When we decrease the volume of some frequencies, we call it a cut.

So how do we know which frequencies to cut or boost? For voiceover, we have certain guidelines. But the actual process of EQ also depends on experience. I will discuss some common guidelines and you will understand them after trying them a couple of times. Audacity has some factory presets and you can go over them to get an idea of what they are doing.

For some voices, a treble boost can make the sound crispier. It depends on the voice type that I will get back to shortly. If you analyze the treble boost graph, it starts boosting at 4 kHz and reaches 9 dB at 5 kHz.

Then it applies a 9 dB boost on the rest of the frequencies. Boost should be limited to 6 dB because a 9 dB boost may sound unnatural. The small white dots you see are drag points. I can drag the green line from the white points.

I will drag the green line from 9 dB to 6 dB. A white dot will appear if I click anywhere at the green line. I can drag it to boost or cut.

I am cutting frequencies after 16 kHz. Because for voice, there is nothing after that frequency most of the time. Let's apply this EQ and let's hear how it sounds.

Audacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording. It sounds crispier. I will undo the EQ effect from history and apply a more advanced EQ. This advanced EQ is recommended for most of the voices. From factory presets, I will use low roll-off for speech.

This preset is slowly rolling off frequencies less than 100 Hz. I will roll off from 80 Hz instead of 100. Because our fundamental frequency can start from as low as 80. Anything less than 80 Hz is not our voice. If there is something beyond 80 Hz, that is probably noise. Rolling off from less than 80 Hz can help to reduce that kind of noise. To add crispiness, I will add the treble boost.

I cannot use that from the factory preset, as that will overwrite the modification I already did. Instead, I will add those manually. I have added two dots on 4 kHz and 5 kHz.

I will drag the 5 kHz dot to 6 dB. Like last time, I will add a cut after 16 kHz. It is a generic EQ that works for most of the voice. However, some voices produce sibilance or sharp S. For that kind of voice treble boost should be avoided or used with a de-esser.

I can save this drawing as a preset so that I do not have to redraw it again next time. Click on save preset and give it a name. I will name it my best EQ1. This preset will appear in user presets. I will apply the EQ.

Vodacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording, though there are a couple of other softwares which is free, but Vodacity is the easiest one to use. You can practice your audio recording and editing in audacity and when you are used to this software you can move to We have to learn about another effect, the compressor. A compressor reduces the gap between louder and quieter sounds. This gap is called dynamic range and the compressor reduces it. You will hear the term dynamic range in audio editing frequently.

Audacity has two kinds of compressors, downward compressor and upward compressor. Configuring a downward compressor with Audacity is difficult as we cannot read values directly from the meter. It uses the RMS value.

which is a bit difficult to read with Audacity. If you check the compress based on Peaks checkbox, an upward compressor will be used. I will use an upward compressor.

The Makeup Gain checkbox does a 0 dB normalization after compressing the sound. It does not matter if you keep this checked or unchecked. Because we normalize after compressing, so this checkbox does not matter. You have to measure a value for the threshold and noise floor from your recording. It will vary from recording to recording, so it is important to understand how to measure it.

It is good to apply the compressor before normalizing. I will get back to the point of editing before the normalize effect. Now I have exactly the original recording, just duplicated also in the bottom track. If you remember, I said these effects have to apply in this order to make a voice recording better.

So I will apply the first two effects and then show you how to measure the compressor's sound levels. I am fast forwarding noise reduction and EQ, as I have already discussed those in detail. I will now apply the compressor in the proper way.

I have to measure a value for the threshold. As I will be using an upward compressor, any value less than the threshold will be increased in volume. I will play some parts of the audio and note where it hits the meter. other softwares which is free but audacity is the easiest one to use you can practice your audio recording and editing in audacity and when you are used to this software you can move to it crosses minus 21 most of the time and the peak hits minus 15. the threshold will be a value between these two values i also have to measure the noise floor value it is just over minus 45. So the noise floor value in the compressor configuration has to be greater than this value.

I will go to compressor effects as I have all the required readings. I will choose minus 18 as the threshold value. Any recording under minus 18 will be increased in volume and the gap with louder sound will be minimized. I kept the noise floor to minus 35, greater than the noise floor I measured. Minus 35 is also less than any spoken word volume, so it is a safe value.

I will choose 4 to 1 as the ratio. Choose a ratio like 3 to 1 or 4 to 1. Too much compression makes the sound unnatural. Audacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording, though there are a couple of other software.

The last effect to make the sound better will be normalize. You can practice your audio recording and editing in Audacity and when you are used to this software, you can move to a more complex software. So this is how the final edited recording sounds.

There is another effect that works as an alternative to normalize. You will need this effect if your project requires a loudness level on LUFS. You can normalize based on RMS or perceived loudness.

Perceived loudness is most used. Some TV channels have a requirement of minus 23 LUFS. Audacity is the best free software.

It may sound a bit of a low volume for YouTube videos. For YouTube videos, you can use minus 18 LUFS. You will notice an increase in the waveform as I apply minus 18 LUFS.

So far, all my shown effects were on the fixing side. Let's see an effect whose purpose is an enhancement, reverb. From factory presets, you can select different kinds of reverb.

You can make the recording sound like it was in a large room or church hall. Different room sizes have different types of sound reflections, and the reverb effect adds that reflection. You can play around with other sliders and check how it sounds. What does it mean the best to be a subscriber? Though there are a couple of other subtleties free, but...

It sounded pretty funny. The last effect I will show in this tutorial is truncate silence. It can be a time-saving effect.

I will fit the entire waveform onto the screen. Go to truncate silence from the special group. Configure how Audacity will recognize a silence.

I configured that if the sound level is less than minus 28 dB for half a second is silence. The action tells Audacity what to do when such a silent part is found. I set to truncate the silence to 0.3 seconds. So whenever my audio has a 0.5 seconds or more extended silence, the silence will cut to 0.3 seconds.

You can see the overall waveform got shorter as the silence parts got truncated. Audacity has many other effects, and I advise you to explore those. If you want to know about any effect in detail, let me know in the comment.

Real-time effects. Real-time effects are a new feature in Audacity introduced in version You can produce better or excellent sounding audio using real-time effects without knowing the details of audio editing. You will drag the necessary effects and your sound will improve instantly. To add real-time effects, click on the effects tab on the track information panel. You can add real-time effects from the add effect button.

Only third-party effects can be used as real-time effects. Audacity did not have good compatible plugins when it first introduced real-time effects. MuseFX has developed some plugins that are both useful and work well with Audacity. Before applying any of these effects, let me show you how to get these effects. Click on Get More Effects, and you will be taken to the Audacity plugin page.

You will get plugin-related updates on this page. You can see what types of third-party plugins are available to Audacity. MuseFX plugin suites have several plugins. and click on MuseFX.

MuseFX is a collection of useful plugins that dramatically impact Audacity's real-time effect. These plugins are blended with Audacity very well. Before these plugins, real-time effects were not that useful in Audacity. Click on the MuseHub link.

You have to install MuseHub Helper and choose the file for your OS. I already have installed MuseHub Helper and I will open it. You will get an icon for MuseHub and go to effects. Remember, this is a helper that lets you download the effects. Click on effects and you will see all the effects available.

I already have installed many effects from here and those show a tick mark. You will see a get button and click on get to download the effect. I recommend you install all the effects you see here.

After the effect gets downloaded, restart your Audacity. I hope you understand the process of how to get MuseHub effects. Back to Audacity and let's make the audio better using real-time effects. I will duplicate the track for future comparison. As the real-time effects panel is already open, I have to click inside the track where I want to add real-time effects.

I will add real-time effects on the top track. There are a couple of effects that make the sound better. The first one is Compress.

Compress will reduce the gap between the louder and quieter sounds. MuseFX Compress also makes the sound louder after compressing. The compress effect is added and clicking on it will open the configuration pop-up. Real-time configurations are easy to configure. You will listen to the audio using different presets and decide which one sounds best.

You can see a list of compress presets here. You can adjust the knob to set how much of the effect you want. If you feel the effect is doing too much, you decrease the knob.

If the effect needs to do more, you increase the knob. You can go back to the defaults from the factory preset. I will play this audio with compress effect and try out different presets. Wada city is the best free software for audio editing and recording. Though there are a couple of other softwares which is free but Wada city is the easiest one to use.

You can practice your audio recording and editing in audacity and when you are used to this software you can move to a more complex software. For mac you have for mac you also have the option of garage band and if you think about some. I think the pop vocals preset is working best for this voice recording. I will add another effect.

Closing the pop-up does not mean the effect is disabled. The effect is active if the blue icon appears before the effect name. I will add an EQ to make the sound crispier.

MuseFX has two types of EQ, ProEQ and SimpleEQ. ProEQ offers a bit of flexibility but also requires some understanding of frequencies. I will add SimpleEQ for now. Like the Compress effect, SimpleEQ has some presets. I will listen to the audio with both effects.

I can switch off and on any effect using this switch button. Let's play and toggle between EQ on and off. Vodacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording.

Though there are couple of other software which is free, but Vodacity is the easiest one to use. You can practice your audio recording and editing in Vodacity and Hoya anyway. I feel it sounded better when EQ was on.

I had only used the presence preset, which is good for voiceover. But I suggest you explore and listen to which sounds best to you. You can change an effect. For example, I want to use Pro-EQ instead of Simple EQ. Pro-EQ has a bit more knobs than Simple EQ.

You can adjust those knobs to adjust a particular frequency range. Let's listen with Pro-EQ. Vodacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording. Though there are couple of other softwares which is free but audacity is the easiest one to use.

You can practice your audio recording and editing in audacity and when you are used to this software you can move to. I feel it sounded best with pop vocals with pro eq. The sound has become quite better but the noise has also increased.

Muse FX does not have a good noise reduction effect at the moment. I hope they will develop one in the near future. MuseFX has a noise gate, but noise gating with strong hissing noise makes the listening experience worse. The noise gate removes noise from quiet parts but comes back suddenly in the spoken parts.

Let's listen with the noise gate on and you will understand the issue. Vodacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording. Though there are couple of other softwares which is free, but Vodacity is the easiest one to use.

You can practice your audio recording and editing in Audacity and when you are used to this software, you can move to a more complex software. For Mac, you also have the option of GarageBand. If you heard through the headphone, you might find this on and off hissing noise distracting.

For noise reduction, I would suggest the built-in noise reduction effect until MuseFX develops something. I will disable the noise gate. I can remove this effect from no effect. I will add a reverb effect which can be used for two purposes.

Either it can add a different type of effect on the sound or it can take care of some room reflections. For example, the vocal booth can minimize room sound reflections. Vodacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording.

Though there are a couple of other softwares which is free but Vodacity is the easiest one to use. You can practice your audio recording and editing in Vodacity and when you are used to this. Not a big difference, but it removed some of the sound reflections in the room.

You can add the same effect multiple times. As I said earlier, reverb could also add a different kinds of sound effects. I will add some sound effects from this reverb effect.

Vodacity is the best free software for audio editing and recording. Though there are couple of other softwares which is free but audacity is the easiest one to use. You can practice your audio recording and editing in audacity and when you are used to this software you can move to a more complex software.

I hope you understand how to get sound effects using reverb. I will remove the second reverb as my intention is to make the sound better only. At this point, you may be wondering about the waveforms.

The bottom track is the original recording, and no effects have been added to it. The top track has three real-time effects applied. But both waveforms look similar.

Real-time effects in Audacity do not show the change in the waveform immediately. If I export the track with real-time effects, I will see the changes in waveform. I am exporting this track and will show you what I mean.

This is the exported track, and if I drag it into Audacity, you will see the change in the waveform. If I play the tracks, you will see the first and third tracks are the same. It is possible to see the waveform change without exporting, but it has another consequence. Click the track with real-time effects.

and go to the tracks menu. Mix and mix and render. You see both the first and third waveforms are the same. Though we can see the change in the waveform, the real-time effects stack no longer appears here. If we want to change the effects we already added, we will not be able to do that.

So I will undo the mixing and want to see which effects have been added. During the export I get the sound I am hearing now, so I feel no necessity to mix and render real-time effects in the track. You can rearrange these effects stack. Though I do not hear any difference in rearranging in this way, Audacity may have plans for the future.

If you have installed any third-party effects and do not see them in the effects list, check if that is enabled. Go to Plugin Manager from Effect. You can find all the plugins here, both enabled and disabled.

These plugins include all the built-in effects from Audacity and any third-party effects. You can enable or disable any plugin. Select the plugin and you will see an enable and a disable button. You can also filter down disabled effects.

I have most of my effects enabled. I do not have any disabled effects currently. MuseFX effects will be enabled automatically once you download the effect and restart Audacity properly. Besides MuseFX effects, other third-party plugins can be found on the plugins page.

You can check if any third-party plugin is available for your need. Usually these plugins are easy to use than built-in effects. You will need a basic understanding of audio editing to use Audacity built-in effects.

With third-party plugins, you can dial some knobs and check how the sound changes. Not every third-party plugin gets into Audacity automatically. You can check the installation process for your OS. MuseFX plugins are easy to install and use.

I suggest you spend some time learning how to use MuseFX effects. Multitrack recording in Audacity. Multitrack recording is essential for producing songs or podcasts. It is also necessary for re-recording parts of the voiceover.

If some parts of the voiceover need to be re-recorded, you can record that part in another track and replace that part from the main track. Once you finish recording a track, clicking on the record button will start recording after the track. It will be the same track, just a different clip.

It is denoted by number 2 of audio track 1. If you mouse over the record button, you will see a keyboard shortcut to record a new track, shift R. However, Shift R will start recording the new track from the last playhead position. If you want to record the new track from the beginning, click at that point to move the playhead, then record. The keyboard shortcut is not the only way to record in multitrack.

From the tracks menu, add new track. It can be a mono track or stereo track based on your need. I will choose the mono track.

Click inside the track from where you want the recording to start. Click on the record button and the recording will start. I have not muted the top track.

So you may be wondering if the top track will be played back during recording. It depends on how to set the overdub. Go to transport and then transport options. I have no tick mark beside the overdub, which means it is off. I can click on it and the overdub will be on.

The overdub feature is on now. If I record something, you will hear both the existing track and the recording. I will let you hear the original sounds during the recording.

Audio editing. You can practice your audio recording and editing in Audacity and when you are used to this software, you can move to a more complex software. For Mac, you have...

I don't find the overdub feature necessary for voiceover recording, so I will turn it off. There is another option after the overdub software playthrough. You will see a headphone input in many microphones.

It is for live monitoring. If you want to hear how your recording sounds during recording, you can use this option. I do not use live monitoring, so I will uncheck the software playthrough option. I have said it before and reminding you again.

If you do not see your connected devices in Audacity, Rescan Audio Devices can help. I will now discuss an interesting effect, very useful for podcasters. The audio I just dragged to Audacity is a piece of music.

Let me expand the tracks a bit. It has become too squeezed after dragging the music track. The voice and music track have similar loudness. It would make it difficult to hear the voice.

Using AutoDuck, I can adjust the music track automatically, though it will not work because the music track has to be on top of the voice track. You can see a message asking for the AutoDuck track to be on the top. You can move the track up or down using the track information panel. I can now apply AutoDuck to the music track.

I will shift the voice to the right so that some music is played before the talking starts. Before applying auto duck, let's listen to how it sounds together. The music is too loud for the voice. The auto duck will take the music down during the talks.

You can set the duck amount, which is minus 12 dB by default. I will apply the default settings. Let's play and listen.

After auto ducking, the music becomes low as the voice starts. It is a handy tool for podcast intro and outro. You can also manually adjust the volume from the envelope tool. Autoduck decided where to lower the music.

You can set two points with the envelope tool and drag the volume down or up. It enables fine-tuning the volume levels. I think the middle part of the music is already at the low points, so the envelope tool is not doing much. I can show this envelope tool from the part where the volume is much louder.

In the end, the music is louder, so let's try the envelope tool here. Select the envelope tool and click at two points. Drag from inside the two points so other audio parts will remain unaffected. I hope you understand how the envelope tool is doing a similar job to Autoduck. Audacity is a powerful tool if you can use it correctly.

You will want to get a single track or file from multiple track. Generating a single track from multiple tracks is called mixing. You can find the mix tool in the tracks menu. To mix multiple tracks, you have to select those tracks. I will select both tracks and go to tracks menu.

You can combine these get to get a single track. It will have the same sound as when the both tracks were playing. If you want to keep both tracks and mix them into a new track, that is also possible. A new mix track is created at the bottom.

To export this mix track, select everything in the track and go to Export. Audacity lets you export your audio in many formats. Wave is a lossless format. that keeps all the audio data. If you need a smaller file size, then you can choose mp3.

I usually choose WAV. You have to choose a location and file name, and you can save. You now know everything to work with multiple tracks in Audacity. In fact, you now know everything you need for voiceover or podcast recording and editing. Let me know in the comment if you want to know anything else about Audacity.

My channel is full of Audacity tutorials, I suggest you browse through those. If you watch all the Audacity tutorials on my channel, I think you will know all the necessary concepts of professional audio editing. If you can comment on which purpose you use Audacity, it will help me to make future videos. For example, if you are generating an audiobook, I can give specific tips for audiobook generation. If you are using it for podcasting, I can guide you in podcast editing.

If you want to generate good quality audio, the first step would be to make sure your recording environment is right. The right recording environment means it is quiet and has no obvious loud background noise. Otherwise, you won't be able to generate as much good sound as you like. Your feedback is very important to make useful videos for you.

As I know Audacity a bit, sometimes I do not understand what a beginner can struggle with. If you give me feedback like I should discuss those concept more, then I will better understand what you are looking for. Audacity is a powerful audio editor that can do most of the audio editing tasks for beginners. Even professional voiceover actors use Audacity as it has all the necessary features. It may lack features of some advanced audio editing softwares but still it is a fantastic audio editor.

Thanks for watching and see you next.

Transcript for:Essential Audacity Basics for Beginners

Transcript for:
Essential Audacity Basics for Beginners