Transcripts
1. Introduction to class: Welcome to this
Skillshare class. In this class, you're going
to see how you can use the audacity compressor tool. We're going to see how
we can use this to raise the audio volume for any
audio that you record. I'm going to first of all
record an audio and then we're going to see how we can
compress this audio, normalize it, Remove
Background Noise, and then eventually
we're going to see how we can amplify it so that you can have
a final product of an audio which is much, much louder than
what we recorded. So if you want to see
how you can do this, then go ahead and start
watching this class, especially if you create
videos for any platform. Let's get started right away.
2. About the Class Project: About the project in the class. This is a project-based class. That means that
you have to follow along and do what I do. So first of all, you
are going to record an audio and you can see my
recording audio sample here. Just record an audio with
low volume like this. And then you follow
along with me everything that I do you do to your audio until you eventually gets to
the final product, something close to this. Eventually, you'll have
a product that has been compressed and
also amplified. Make sure that you
follow along with this project by recording and audio and then doing
everything as we do it. And then eventually you'll have a final product that
looks like this.
3. Recording an audio in Audacity: We need a project to icon. Let's start by
recording an audio. To record an audio just
installer density, and then click on
the Record button. And if it doesn't record, make sure that the correct
microphone is selected. I'm going to click on record. This is a simple
audio that I want to walk on and I want
some areas to be loud and some errors just
to be lower than the rest. And then we're going to
rectify these areas later on. That's pretty much it
for this audio sample. I will stop. We've recorded our audio
in the next video to see how we can start compressing this audio and making it louder. Will continue in the next video.
4. Remove white noise in audacity: Before I do any
compression on this audio, I want to make sure that
there is no white noise. I want to remove the background
noise in this video. And then after that
tubing to compress and normalize the
audio so that we can raise the amplitude of
these audio so fast, I just select there, and I will use the noise
reduction feature in Audacity. You can get the noise mixture. These are low because
the best way to do noise reduction needs
to do it multiple times using low ratios. I'm going to click on
get the noise profile. Then I just come back and
repeat noise reduction. The audio is pretty short, so it's going to happen pretty fast and you won't even
see what's happening. And also have other plugins are x if you know about
our x isotope RX, I do have that installed as
well and I can use some of those features to remove
the noise in my audio. So I'm going to do a denoise and I'm just going
to apply these. Apply. You can see my audio
is pretty small, therefore everything
happens instantaneously. My audio is shot, and that's why it's happening
instantaneously. Once they removed the
background noise, the next thing I wanted to do, I went to raise the amplitude
of my audio and I can just use the normalized
feature of audacity. So if I scroll up, I'm going to find normalize. The reason I'm normalizing is because it's going to have
me do the compression. How is it going to help me when it comes to
doing a compression? I'm going to look at let me zoom out and it's going to help
me do the compression. May have been me. Know
which areas of the audio, the lowest and which
are the highest. And that's going
to help me choose. For instance. I can look at that and I want to see the highest
point of the audio. Keep an eye out on here. And it's going to
mark the highest area of our audio when we get
to do the compression. That's pretty much it for the, you can see, let's
play it again. So that's pretty much it. You can see that the
highest point of the audio was actually at 0. And that's probably because they are cliques in this audio. So let me remove some of these clicks and if
we come down here, no, if you don't have our X, our X, you don't
have to do this. I'm just using this because it is a plugin
that they have. If you don't have it, then
don't worry about it. We'll apply that. And it's going to remove any
of those clicks, if any. That's it for this video.
In this video we've seen how we can remove
the background noise. So if you don't have the
rakes are x plugins, what you can do is you can just use noise reduction
from audacity. You get the noise
due to again until, until there is no
background noise. And once you're done with that, you'll just come and normalize the audio to raise the
amplitude of the audio. So that's it for this video. In the next video, let's
compress our audio.
5. Audacity Compressor settings: The next step is
compressing the audio. What is audio compression Audio compression is bringing out the highest parts
of the audio to match with the lowest
parts of the audio. So you can see
this one is pretty high and some of
these are pretty low. So compression will help
you to try and reduce the high levels of your audio so that they can match with
the low points of the audio. Let's just look at the
compression tool in Audacity. And then I'm going to explain the compression aspects of this tool when you're
using it in Audacity. I'm going to come
here and effects. It will look for the compressor, is just click on compressor. Let me explain what
these settings do. Now, the threshold at what points you want to
reduce your audio to. The height is negative
14 is high. Of course. The higher it is, the less your audio is going
to get compressed. So if it is there, your audio will not
get to compressed. And let me just do
this as an example. I'm going to take it there
to negative eight dB. And I will just do, make sure that you don't check this uncheck that
if it is checked. So this is just a
sample that I'm doing. I'm just going to do that. And you can see the compression
was not even visible. The compression is not even noticeable because of the
setting I chose there. If a compact to effects
and compressor. Before I do that, let me
just Control Z to undo. If your notes on
Windows like me, you can just come
here under Edit and you'll do and do compressor, will come up to effects, and then I will go to
compressor once again. And this time round,
let me increase the threshold and let me
just put it somewhere. I don't Patty, this
may seem like a lot, but this is usually the best way that I
do my compression. When you do that, you'll
see that your audio has definitely been compressed. And this is very visible. I will do Control Z. Again. I'm back here. I can dispute there instead
of doing Control T, and let's come back to the compressor, the
compressor tool. The most important settings
here at threshold. Now the most important
settings here, the threshold and
the noise flow. Now, as for the noise flow, you're probably wondering what
this is. The noise floor. This is the point at which you don't want
any compression to happen because it's going to affect the quality
of your audio. At this point, if you
compress your audio, the noise flow may take some
of it or do from there. Let me find out what
is the noise db, the white noise db on my audio. If I put it there, let me just select that
area and they can play. And you can see
that the noise db, the noise level is around
negative 54 decibels. That means that
if I wanted to be safe in compressing my audio, I'll come here and effects
in the compressor tool. Where is your compressor? The compressor tool, and I
can raise this above that. Their noise, for me, noise is about the right. This is where the
white noise is. What I can do is I can raise it so that it doesn't
take any of my audio. I can raise it up
into negative 40 dB. That way I'm going to make
sure that even the low point of my audio or not compressed. And if they're compressed, it may affect the overall
quality of my audio. Then the next thing
here we have the ratio. Now just play around with this. I usually just do two to one, but you can do more by
two to one is always a good choice whether
you are doing music or you're doing
voiceovers like this, just do two to one. Or you can even
try at the ratios and see the result
that it brings to you attack time and went
to leave it as 0.2 seconds. You need to put this
at a low level. Because if you do it
at a higher time, you will find that there are certain areas that
we get compressed. I'll just put mine
Art somewhere there. In this video, we've looked at the compression
settings. For Audacity. You can just choose your
settings based on your audio. Let's use this other Lewis
point of audio in plate. Later on. You can see that's
about negative 16 dB. That means that if you come
here under the compressor, you want to make sure
that at least you're compressing to about
negative 16 dB. But for me I want
to make sure that the compression happens once. So I can just put it down, even up to negative 2225 dB. And I will do the compression
and you'll see that the results are very
visible on the audio waves. You can even compress again
if you still find that the audio and not in line
as much as you want, you can come back and
do another compression. But of course, that also affects the quality
of the audio. Just going to show
you how to normalize. But in the next video we're
going to do amplification. You can come back
here and you can normalize the audio to 0 dB. You'd have to do compression
a number of times. If you really want the
audio to be in line, you'd have to do
compression multiple times. But that is not advisable
because it also affect the quality of
the audio. Somehow. In this video, just
gone over how you can quickly compress the audio
and raise the volume. In the next video, Let's see
how you can read the volume if the volume of your
audio to be over 0 dB. If you normalize, you
see that the maximum you can get is 0 decibels. Let's welcome that.
In the next video, we're going to
amplify the audio. As for now, I'm
just going to undo, undo, normalize, but I
can live the compression. Let's continue in
the next video.
6. Amplify your Audio - Conclusion: I have compressed the audio. If you want to, you can even
do a compression again. You can even reduce that father and then do the
compression again. In this video, after
doing compression, what I want to do is I
want to amplify the audio. Amplification can also
be done by anomalies, but if you normalize the audio or they did in the last video, you'll see that you
can't go above 0 dB. Maybe this is not
loud enough for you and you want
it to be louder. So let's see how we
can amplify the audio. In this video. I'm going to come
here on the effects and I'll click on amplify. Amplification. Maybe
you want to amplify. Please note that I
have selected this. If I select this, it means that I will
allow clipping. If I uncheck that and I put my maximum peak
amplitude to one dB, it's going to disable
this buttons. And this is because it wants to make sure that you
know what you're doing. And if you raise the
audio up to this level, there will be some clipping. You can preview the audio. This is a sample audio that
if the audio is pretty, pretty low and you've
compressed it to it, and you want to
raise it to two dB, you can try and do
that and listen to it. And if the quality
is not too bad, then you can use that, but
just stick with one dB. If you really want to raise
your audio to above 0 dB, I'm going to amplify that. Of course this is louder
than the one we had. And you can see I
still have room. I can even go above one dB. Why don't you try
and do undo that? And then we're going
to see amplification. And let's try and
amplify up to 1.5, up to 1.5 dB. There is no clipping. The audio gets clipped on
once it reaches there. Let me just do an
example to show you how your audio
will get clipped. Let's come to amplify, and let's just go
crazy with this. Let's do it up to four. Now this is too
much amplification, so let's just try
and see the result. Even these, you can see that the audio is still
not that clipped, so it will be loud, but some of the audio
has been clipped. You can select there. The audio has gone
above that line, and that means that
it was clipped. You can even go crazier and
take it to ten decibels. I'm just doing this to show you the implication of this value. Then this one clearly shows you how much audio
has been clipped. And you can see, in this case, everything has been clipped or the audio was
amplified and clipped. Anything that was above
this line got clipped. Let's Play and listen
to the quality. This is a simple audio
that I want to walk on. And you can even hear
that the audio quality is not sounding
like it's too loud. So the next thing,
I'm just going to undo that and I wanted to go back to my value of 1.5,
which seemed normal. Okay, So if you compare
that quantity with this, this is a sample
audio that I went to work on and I want
some areas to be loud. This is a walkabout audio. This is audio that you can use. And you see that based on the original
audio that you heard, the sound is much louder, the quality is much louder. You want to have
problems whereby people have to raise
their volumes too much, raise the volume too much to listen or hear what
you're saying. That was the point
of this tutorial. We've gone through all
the steps that you need to mature audio,
at least louder. That's it for this. If you have any questions, feel free to let me know. I hope this will
help you to increase the volume of your audio using the audacity compression and the amplification
tool in Audacity. That's it for this tutorial. I will see you in another one.
Ricky Wahowa, Teaching Serious Web Technology stuff
