Audacity: Producing & Recording with Powerful Free Software

1. 1: Hello, everyone. Welcome to audacity had a lot of requests for this class, so I thought I dive in and make one. Audacity is a great tool for sample editing, wave editing, even sequencing and building tracks from scratch. Right in audacity. You could do it. It's a free program. It's open source. We'll talk more about that in the class. What that means for you, a zehr using it. It's very powerful. There's a lot of people that contribute to this program and make it what it is. So I think it's a really powerful program. I'm glad to see a lot of people interested in it. I personally use it in all honesty, as a supplemental program to my main audio sequencer. I think it's great for some of the synthesis elements of the sound design elements that I do, and I'll talk a lot about in that in the class. But I will also talk about using it as your main sequence er for editing, which you can totally do. It has all those capabilities in it. So in this class we're gonna talk about all these things, how to use audacity. We're gonna talk about some audio concepts, but not in a ton of detail. What we're really going to do here is focused on how to use audacity from beginning to end and go through all its features and what it can do everything from recording to generating sound Teoh editing to some of its really powerful analysis tools. So, um, this won't be a class that talks about how digital audio works, how to get the best quality recording and what is the best kind of microphone to use And all that, um, will reserve that for another class in this class, We're just gonna talk about how to use audacity, and we're gonna go through it in quite detail. So, uh, please join in. I think you'll have a really good time and we will see you on the inside. 2. 2: Okay, let's start off with a little bit of background on this program on audacity. So who makes it? Um, it's not your typical program where you go to a company and buy it. Audacity is an open source program, which means you can download, like, the raw code to build it, and you can modify it if you want to. Most of us aren't going to do that. Most of it are gonna. Most of us are going to download a version of the application. That's been what we call compiled and all put together so we can just run it without having to deal with any of that stuff. But if you wanted to go in and say, Oh, I wish I had a little button over here that did something you can actually do that if you really know how. It's quite tricky. Um, and then there's a process for, like submitting things that included in the next version of the app and all that stuff. I'm not gonna talk about any of that. Um, What we need to know, though, is if in audacity we go to about, we can see the main people that contribute to it. So the main developers and then support and then some emeritus developers and then other team members and then contributors thes air people that have donated timeto working on it based on code from some other projects. So there's a lot of people here and no specific company behind it. You know, it's a lot of, um, donated time to make this this application. So there's a lot of APS like that out there, so it's called open source. And with any open source program, you'll see this GPL licensed somewhere that basically says what you're free to do with it. Um, nothing to worry about. You can read that if, like, I'm gonna say OK, that. So what that means for us is that the program is free, right? Like it doesn't cost anything. Um, however, ah, lot of people donate time to it. So I do want to make a quick little plug here. If you go to audacity that source forge dot net, which is where you can download the program. This is the main page for it. Ah, there is a donate button here, and you can make a quick little donation to it. if you use this program a lot, especially if you're making money selling your tracks. Ah, I highly suggest the ethical thing to do would be to make a donation to audacity. Um, because there are a lot of people have been a lot of time into it, and the more of us that donate to it Ah, the more of us, the more development that will continue to happen with. Okay, um, so here's where you can download the app. Let's get rid of this donate. But this is where we can download audacity. Now here it's coming up for me as download the latest Mac version. I'm gonna be working throughout this whole class on the Mac version. However, I do want to tell you that it's available on a lot of different platforms. There is a Windows version, there's a Mac version, and there's even a Lennix version of it. So if you are a Lennox person, you can go crazy. There are some older versions here, so those are under the download tab. So I've already downloaded it, So I'm gonna get out of here. So it's made by whole bunch people. Ah, it's free. But you should donate. If you're really into this program, you should consider it. Um and it exists for Mac Windows and PC. I'm gonna be working on the Mac version, but the Windows version looks nearly identical. 3. 3: Okay, What can you do with audacity? You can do a lot with audacity. Actually, it's a very powerful program. Ah, it doesn't look like it. It's got a very kind of unassuming look to it. But there's a lot in here that you can dio. One of my favorite uses, for it is simply as a wave form editor, and what that means is that I'm not going to multi track in this program. It's not gonna be a replacement for my main multi track software, like I use a built in for most of my stuff. And this is not a replacement for able to, although you can multi track in it and we'll talk about that later. Um, to me, it's not the strongest program for multi tracking with a couple of exceptions, where there are some sound design things you can do an audacity where you would use it as a multi tracking thing. If you don't talk about, just sit tight. We'll talk about that later. So as a wave form editor, what that means is that we would open up a single sound in this case. I have a stereo sound, so you see to wave forms, and I would manipulate this sound and do a bunch of processes to it to make it sound the way I wanted it sound. And then I might export it and pull it into my session where I'm building a whole track. Then you can, Like I said before, build a whole track in there. I don't want any like audacity loyalists to be like, No, I do all my sequencing and audacity. That's great. You can actually can do that. Um, but for my students in my college classes, I don't actually recommend that, um, I think something like, you know, pro tools able to in logic, something like that is much more flexible. Um, and but for sound design, there are some really cool things you can do in audacity that are actually easier to do an audacity than in the other programs. So I treated as kind of away form editor. I can go in. I could make little things like I could say, like, this little one second blip I want to get rid of. I just hit the delete keep and it's gone, you know, like maybe this whole section I want to get rid of and it's gone. Or maybe I just want this little tail, Maybe just this tiny thing here. I want to see if I could make something out of that. You know, I can do that. If I wanted, I could do these very fine things. Maybe I want to get in and look at individual samples. I want to zoom just way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way in like this. So that now I'm looking at each of these dots. Is the individual sample, right? Like I am way zoomed in like, ridiculously a zoomed in. But here I can start manipulating on the sample level, you know, And this would be very difficult, if not impossible to do in most ah applications. This is one of the only applications where you can do it. So there's a lot of things you can do in audacity. But what I like it most for is to work on single file for sound design purposes, um, and doing effects time manipulations, pitch manipulations, things like that. And then pulling it into my main session. You don't have to work that way you can do multi tracks. We could go to track, add new at audio track, and we can add as many tracks as we we can handle here. And we could do a lot of cool stuff this way, and that's totally okay. Um, so you're welcome to work on it, and I'll be talking about how to work that way if you want to work that way. So that's what I like to use audacity for, um, but again, it's very flexible. So there's a lot you can do here. Okay, let's move on and talk about one important thing to note, and that's what version you're you're looking at. 4. 4: okay, real quick. I just want to mention the version because this is important. Ah, I find that an open source software. There's versions tend to come out more often than in commercial software, and they also tend to come out with less pomp and circumstance. Right. So what that means is that they might quietly release another version, and that's always great for you. Um, the more up to date versions that come out the better. Um, but in terms of following along with this class, I want you to know what version I'm working on. So I'm gonna go appear to about audacity again. So where I saw the list of all these authors I'm gonna look right here. Audacity. Two point. 0.6. That's what I'm working on for this class. You don't have to be working on two point. 0.6. If you are working on a newer version, um, you should be great in great shape. The odds are there's just a couple of new things in every version that comes out that's higher than two point. 0.6. Um, unless there's like an aversion three, then it could be a significant update, but it's two point something. Ah, you'll be fine. Even older versions, um, won't be radically different, so you should be fine. But there's no reason you would use an older version than this unless you're going back in time and then watching this in the future. Um, so use at least 2.0, point six. Ah, And you know, just when in doubt, just go to the audacity website and download the newest version. I mean, it's free. So, um, there's no harm in doing that. I make it a habit. Actually, if I haven't used audacity in ah couple months, I usually go to the website and just download whatever the newest one is just to make sure I have the newest one. Um, just because I like having new stuff because I'm nerd. Um, Okay, so that's it. I'm gonna be on two point. 0.6 for this whole class. Um, you're welcome to be on whatever version you want. Um, if things don't match up perfectly Ah, with what I'm doing with what you see on your screen, that's probably why, and that's just fine. You might have to dig around a little bit, but it shouldn't be too different 5. 5: Okay, let's talk about some quick picks up stuff. Um, that I want you to look at now in audacity. We have our main set up stuff is right here is our audio in and out. That's what we need to find. First, that's all these drop downs appear. I'm on a Mac, so this is going to say core audio and then built in output for my output device. That's what it's playing out of that. That's your speakers. Basically, input is built in microphone. That's how we just have it set up here, and then how it's gonna record. It's gonna record two channels or one channel. I'm actually inside that the one channel going to use a microphone Now, I If you're using an external audio interface, you should see it here where you're hooked up to some other speakers or some other audio stuff. This built in output is pretty much my headphone jack, and the built in microphone is the internal like microphone built into my computer. Um, I do have another. I am plugged into an external audio interface and microphone, but it's not showing up here, and I think probably just because, um my screen capture recording software is using that. So it's not wanting to latch onto it because, um, the microphone is in use by the screen Capture. Tough where? But, um, this is just fine. Ah, it's gonna play out my headphone jack, and it's going to, ah, play out or it's gonna record into using my internal microphone. So know where is there I can if I actually go up here? This is my output level of my volume. I'm not planning anything right now, but if I dio way we see our output volume there and I hear it so everything's working. Ah, this is my input volume here. So this is the volume, my microphone. And remember, it's using the internal microphone, but if I click on it, we go into monitoring mode, so I should be able to see it. Okay, so now we're just picking up. Ah, my my voice coming through the air into my computer. It's not actually using the same microphone that I'm using to talk into right now. Um, so if I tap my computer near the microphone, you know, you see it a lot more. Okay, So, uh, that's why set up stuff there. Now, there's a lot more set up stuff if I go to the audacity menu and then preferences and look through this. So this is this devices menu is the same as what we saw out here, right? Core audio built in one device, channels, playback. You can mess with this. I'm not gonna go through all of these things and a lot of detail, but preview length recording. Do you want overdub? Ah, quality. If you want to work at a different sampling rate than 44 1 maybe you wanna work a 48? Um, you can set it there. You will want to work at a different ah format. Um, well, you can't go any higher than 32 bit float, but that's plenty good. Some other things. Um What? Your display works with some track defaults, import export. Um, you know, this is well when saving projects. Ah, some extra libraries. This will come back to later this lame MP three library. We'll talk about that shortly. That's kind of a weird thing, um, with audacity, and I'll explain it in detail later. So sidebar. If you have encountered this thing without acid e where you have to save it at that where you try to save as an MP three and it says I can't do it. You can get audacity to do it. Um, we're gonna talk about that shortly. So hang around. Spectra Grams will look at those That's basically ah, visualization of the sound, some directory stuff you won't really need to say to visit any of these things. Key commands. You can rewrite key commands if you want over here and some mouse settings. So ah, lot of settings in here. Main ones we really care about are the devices and the recording quality sending 40 and set us back to 44 1 just so I don't confuse my computer while I'm recording the audio from the screen capture at 44 1 Those are the main two things I care about. Then maybe the keyboard commands. If I have some key commands that I really want to use, I could change them. Okay, so you say OK and go back to my main thing. So now those are my settings. Ah, my audio and some other stuff in that settings menu. When in doubt, always go to this preferences menu and then see what you can find for here if you're looking for a general setting and audacity. 6. 6: Okay, One last thing before we dive into the nitty gritty of this program. Um, I just want to point out Ah, again, I think I probably did this in the intro, but I want to point out one more time that what we're going to cover in this class I'm not gonna be talking about audio concepts and, um, how to work with audio and how to write tracks and all of these things. This is really kind of an AP class, and what that means is that we're gonna talk about how to use this app, how to use audacity to do ah, bunch stuff if you want to learn kind of the fundamentals of how digital audio works. Um, what some of those settings mean in the preferences window that we just looked at, I highly encourage you to take the, um, intro to electronic music class that I've posted here. Um, it's a great class. It has a hole like, I think, hour and 1/2 or so on digital audio concepts, how to work with digital audio, how to prevent clipping distortions, how to get cool sounds and all kinds of stuff. In addition, I have these two sound design classes sampling and synthesis with that talks about how to work with different kinds of audio. Ah, for actually generating tunes and stuff like that. So I encourage you to check out those classes to fill in the gaps on some of these audio concepts that you might encounter in this class. Um, I'm gonna keep this pretty basic when it comes to the audio concept, so I don't think you'll get too overwhelmed at all. But, ah, I just want to say that that, you know, I'm not gonna spend a lot of time explaining, like, you know, what exactly the sampling rate does. I've covered that in other classes. Um, and you should check those out. Okay, let's dive in and learn how to use this thing. 7. 7: Okay, let's start by importing some audio into audacity. Really? Basic. Right. So I'm gonna go. I'm gonna close this. No, I don't need to save it. Okay, let's get rid of that. And now, let's see. So here's audacity down here, it's still open. There are three ways that I can import audio An audio file. One is the classic way that I always do, which is to take an audio track and drag it right onto the application. Now, this is a Mac thing. Um, it's an MP three file, so it's got to do some analysis, and then it shows me the file. So that's that's a Mac specific thing. I don't know if you can do that on a PC. Um, the more obvious way that you can do on any platform is to go to file open navigate to an audio file. I don't even know what this is. And there we have it. There's our audio file, and I have to audio files open two windows the third way close this because of this, which is handy to know. So I'm going to go. I'm in audacity. Audacity is open here, but there's no window. I'm gonna go to New and it opens an empty audacity session. Right? There are no tracks because there's no audio. Now, actually, in my finder, Aiken, just drag a piece of audio into this window and let go, and it's gonna pull it in just like before. So those are the three ways on a Mac. The dragon drop ways. The first and third ways. I just showed you not exactly sure those will work on a PC or Lennox. I'm really not sure. But this file open is always gonna work. So on. Try that. Okay, so that's how we can get some audio in. But what if we don't have audio? Let's talk about generating some audio right in audacity, and we have two ways we can do that. We can use one of their tone generators or sound generators. Let's just call them or we can record something. Let's do Ah, some of their sound generators First. In the next video 8. 8: okay. I want to generate some sounds right in audacity. So I'm gonna close this, Don't save. And then here I am still in audacity. Gonna go to file new. So now I have an empty file. You've gotta have an empty file open to do this or I take that back. You don't need to have an empty file. You gotta have something opened. You could add this as another track to something else. But now we can go up to this generate tab up here, and I've got a couple of things. Aiken, Dio Aiken generate a chirp a d t m f tones, noise, silence tone, click track pluck or recip drum. So let's go through each of these really quick. So that's generated chirp. So here are my options. What kind of wave form do I want? Ah, the frequency interpolation and the durations is gonna be 30 seconds. It was a long trip. Weird. OK, so why is it called the trip? Well, I'll tell you, I'm gonna delete that, and I'm gonna go to trip again. I'm gonna do that same thing, but have it last. Ah, 0.5 seconds. That sounds a little bit more like a chirp if I did it even shorter. Oh, let's delete that and do it one more time. Let's do it hundreds of a second. It's a little too short, but it goes really fast, right? It's going up. Um, so that's a trip. You can just generate those tones now. Why would you want to do that? There's actually a good reason. Ah, lot of these tones that you can generate in audacity are not particularly interesting on their own. But once you start doing effects and some sound design elements, um, like plug ins, time stretching things like that, you can start to generate really interesting sounds from it. So they're kind of like a blank canvas to work from. Let's look at one of the other ones. Let's do noise so we can generate white noise, pink noise or brownie and noise. Let's do white noise. Amplitude of eight for 30 seconds. Cool. I am now. It's noise. I'm zoomed way in here. Let's zoom out So it looks more like noise. Here we go. So it's nice. That's noise, right? Um, so again, with this, you can you can make some cool stuff if you start applying effects and doing some stuff. So delete that. And I'm deleting this, by the way, just hitting the delete key while it's selected. Stoudt MF tones. So dtm f tones are dual tone multi frequency, which is a really fancy way to say an old school telephone. Um, that's what they did. So you can type in the sequence here that you wanted to do. Um, so you can say, Ah, here they have it spelling out audacity. Let's have it spell out, Um, my name. Oh, I can't do spaces. So there we go. It's gonna spell out my name. And here we go, Right. Old school telephone, um, spelling out my name. So that's kind of a cool trick. You can spell out weird little things and have people try to figure out what they are. Um, a fixed win style, if you want. That's DTM F tones. Dual tone, multi frequency noise. Silence. This can actually be handy. 30 seconds of silence. There you go. Delete that one. See what else we got. Tone, This is the one I probably used the most. Because we can generate really pure tones here. We can say, Let's make a saw tooth waveform at the frequency of 2 20 hertz. Ah, and a 2.8 for Let's do this a little bit longer. Let's do this. This is set toe very, very short. Let's do 30 seconds like the others. Okay, Now I have 30 seconds of a square wave, which just sounds like that. But one of the things that I love using this for this is probably not relevant to you. But when I'm talking about synthesis, I like to say, Okay, a square wave. It sounds like this. Now let's look at what or this is a sawtooth wave. Sorry, So that's what it sounds like. Now let's look at why we call it a sawtooth wave. So I'm zooming in, zooming in, doing in, and now I can see I can zoom in so far that I can see the actual wave form, right? And that's why we call it a sawtooth wave because it looks like the blade of a saw. It's pretty cool. Um, so I used these a lot soon back out. Get rid of that click track. So we have a lot of options here. Basically what is our tempo, um, weaken. Generate a couple of different kinds of things. Let's just leave the defaults. It's at 1 20 hear what we've got. It's gonna emphasis on one following the tempo. It's kind of toilets handy. Look, here's a little pluck. It's a plucked string. Um, synthesis. Okay. And ah, Reese, a drum. This is Ah, a synthesized drum sound based on the work of Jean Claude, we say, Ah, French composer. That's just hear it by its default, right there it is. So it's an algorithm that generates that sound. These are handy for ah, you know, like I said before using as kind of your blank canvas so you can generate effects that way . Okay, so that's two ways that we've talked about and how to get sound into audacity. Weaken! Generate it or we can pull a sound in the third way is obviously record some stuff. So let's record some stuff into audacity. 9. 9: Okay, so we want to record into audacity. Now, the way I'm set up here, I can only record one thing at a time because I'm using the internal microphone of my laptop here. Okay, so let's do it. I'm gonna close this just to start from scratch here. Okay? Now I'm gonna go to file. I mean, audacity and profile New. Okay, here we go. So I'm gonna make sure that my record setting zehr correct. So I'm using my built in microphone, and I'm gonna record in mono, which is only one channel. Now, the reason I'm gonna record in mono instead of stereo is because I only have one recording source here. Right. Um and I can tell that by if I go up here and click on my, ah record settings, I can see that there's only one channel coming in. So I'm school record on one channel. I could record on two channels anyway, but I probably am gonna end up with an empty channel that I'm gonna have to deal with that later. So I'm gonna record mono because I'm just recording one microphone. Okay, so let's try it. Okay, So I do not need to do any any set up for a track. Whenever I hit record, it's gonna make a new track. So I'm just gonna hit record, and then I'm gonna say something. I don't know what I'm gonna say yet. Um, okay. Hello, class. This is me talking and recording into audacity now. All right. Okay. And then I had to space part of stop, which I could have hit record also, or stop here again to stop it. But that's OK. So let's see what we've got. Hello, class. This is me talking and recording into audacity now. All right. Okay. So a recorded a good the recording quality isn't brilliant because it's just using the internal microphone. It's not using the microphone that I'm talking into right now. Um, but that's a court. That's okay. So I've recorded into it. Now I can record another track If I just hit record again, I get another track, right? And I can Hello, class doing any talking. So here. I got a little loud because I was trying to talk over that one, but I can record a whole bunch of things individually by doing this just hitting record over and over and over. So that is our third way of getting stuff into audacity. We can import stuff, weaken, generate stuff or weaken record stuff. So once we have stuff in here, we need to start working with it. So let's talk about some basic editing stuff that weaken due in audacity in the next video . 10. 10: Okay, Now that we've got some audio in here, let's poke around and see what we've got. So first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get rid of this second track. So what I want to do in this video is talk about our basic playback functions and some of these settings over here. So one of the first things I want to show you is how to get rid of a track. We have this little X right up here. I'm gonna click that and that tracks gone. All right, Now, our basic functions here, I can click anywhere to put the cursor there. Right, That's where the cursor is gonna be. And when I hit play, it's gonna start playing from right there. Now, this If you don't have this cursor of or if this isn't working the way that I'm explaining it, look up here. These are kind of six tools, and we'll be looking at all of these individually later. But right now, I'll be sure you're on this one. This is our main selection tool. We can click and drag to highlight stuff, or we could just click somewhere to put the cursor right on it. So wherever you put the cursor and then hit play, that's where it's gonna start playing from. I can Also, instead of hitting play just like with almost every audio application in the world. The Universal key command for playing is the space bar. So I could just hit the space bar to play and stop. Oops. Okay. Okay. Other options I've got here that I want to just point out quickly. Here is some stuff here. So mute means Don't play this track but play all the other tracks. If we have them, solo means Onley play this track and mute all the other tracks, right? It's we don't see any others, but Solo would mute them all. And Onley show this one. This is our volume control so we can boost or pull down the volume. Or just leave it right where it was recorded just right in the middle. And this is our panning left and right so I can make it come out of the left speaker or to the right speaker, or make it come out of both by leaving it right in the center. Now this is Ah, this arrow down here is a new function in this version, I think, um, where I can minimize this track. So pretty handy if you have a lot of stuff going on. Ah, One other thing, I'll put it out. Here. Is this play button? If you hold down the shift key, it turns into a loop button. So this whole loop everything, you gotta hold down shift and then hit it. Okay? There's a whole bunch more stuff in this menu right here that I want to look at in the next video. 11. 11: Okay, A bunch more options here in this drop down menu, and these could be really important. So name, you know, would give it a name. Let's call this, um, Box one. Okay, so now we've named that track. Ah, we can move the track up or down in the list. Ah, the hierarchy of Of where it sorted. Those were great out because we only have one track right now. What are we looking at right now? We're looking at the wave form, so that's great. Out. We can look at the way form decibels. So this is actually showing it mawr in relation to zero and negative 60. So it's a little bit different. Way to look at it. Not as typical as this is more common for your, uh, most Dawes, Spectra Graham, which is fun to look at. This is like a kind of a picture of the frequency and volume of each frequency. So we see frequency over here from zero K eight k, and then volume of those frequencies is by color. So when there's nothing, there's nothing there. The redder it is, the more pitchy, the more on that of that pitch that it found will be more interesting if we drag this down . You know, when we can really kind of see this is handy for some, some mastering stuff. You can really go in here and kind of figure out what frequencies are missing in in certain areas and things like that. So another way to look at it. Another version of Spectra Graham that looks at it a little bit differently is down there. And now. Okay, let me go back to may be more familiar setting here, so let's close that back up, get us back to away form, okay? I just want to get us back to the most typical way that we look at stuff. Okay. Now, down here is we have some channel settings mono because this is a mono track. We're looking at it. Ah, in the mono setting is selected by default. But we could look at the Left Channel or the right channel. They're gonna look the same in our case. Um or actually, this isn't necessarily a view option. I should re say that, um, were not looking at the Left Channel right channel. We could say treat this as a left channel. Treat this as a right channel or treat this as mono could make it a stereo track, although it's not letting us do that because it doesn't have the information it needs. If we were working on a stereo track, who could say, swap stereo track channels being meaning? Make the right channel the Left Channel and Left Channel the right channel split stereo track, meaning if this was a split stereo track, In fact, I'm just gonna open a stereo track. Okay, so here's a stereo track single pitch on a cello. So now let's go back and look at some of these options here, so ah, swap stereo channels switched them out. Split stereo track. So basically what this means is take this stereotype back and treat it as to mono tracks rather than one stereo track. So now I've got settings for this one, which looked more like my model track that I just had right or and the same thing here, right? Or I could do in this one. I could say make stereo track and then rejoined them together. So that is a handy little trick. Sometimes when you need Teoh Ah, do some Ah, lot of repair work like when we have a recording that's kind of screwed up. We might. I want to use that that trick of splitting them into separate Mondo tracks, doing some work, then putting it back together or not. Ah, splits cherry tomato. We can set the sample format and weaken set thes sampling rate of the track here. So a bunch of settings down in this menu it's a handy menu to know and be comfortable with , because you might find yourself needing to get into one of these things, and this is a quick way to get at them. Okay. Now, as promised, let's move on and talk about editing and moving stuff around, putting some stuff together and making some music. 12. 12: Okay, let's talk about editing in audacity, starting with the basics. So cut, copy, paste. Three things that you know from Microsoft Word and all of any text editing application. They all still work. So first thing we're gonna do in order to do this is make sure that we're on the selection tool up here thing that looks like a capital I. So then we need to highlight something, And now we can cut copy paste. And the key commands are actually the same as in any kind of text. Ah, application as well. So I can dio for me. It's command. See, to copy and command V to paste. But you can also go up here and you cut, delete, copy, paste or duplicate. So let's do, um let's go somewhere. Okay? This isn't gonna be extremely elegant, so I'm gonna highlight all of this just by clicking and dragging. I'm just gonna hit the delete key and get rid of it so that we start right here. Okay, I'm gonna delete all this, Okay? I just basically want that bar. Now. What I really should do is zoom in and, um, make sure I got exactly a bar, but I'm not gonna be very precise about it right now. Okay, so I'm on the selection tool. Let's say I want just this beat, okay? I'm gonna say copy now. Now I've got it copied, right, cause I did command, See? But I could go here and say copy Now, I could put it somewhere else if I let's click somewhere and let's say let's put it right there, Like, right where that beat is. So when I hit paste here, what it's gonna do is it's gonna insert it right there and gonna nudge everything else over . Okay, so that's what I just did there. So now I'm gonna hear that beat in between there, and it may or may not be smooth. Let's hear. I think it was right there. I jumped back a little bit more. Um, let's see that when we're time to make it really clear. So let's do it right here. Case and I inserted it right there. That's what I just inserted. So let's go to the beginning of this excerpt, okay? Not terribly smooth, but you get the point. It nudged everything over if I wanted it to replace something I could highlight a bunch of stuff and hit paste. Now, when I do it, it's gonna get rid of all of this and replace it with that chunk that I copied. Even though the chunk that I copied is much smaller than this, it's going to get rid of the excess. So one way to tell what happened as you'll see the end of the file get shorter because there's less stuff there, said Say Paste, the end zipped in a little bit. All of that that was highlighted got deleted and it got replaced with just This theme was kind of fun. Um, okay, so that's copy and paste right? I can cut just by highlighting stuff and hitting the delete key or highlighting stuff and hitting Cut Command X. I guess it is here. I always just hit the delete key because it's faster and makes sense. So that's cut Copy Paste A won't one more thing if I want to pay something on the end, it works the same. So I'm going to copy this chunk here and let's say I put it right here. I just put the cursor where I want it, even if it's at the very end. And then I hit paste and it adds it to the end So I could hit paste all day long here and make a whole bunch stuff even with space in between, Right? Right. Um, I could even dio What if I wanted to make this little Jang Keir Just eyeballing this, But I think this might sound kind of interesting kind of fun. Okay, so you can add stuff to the end as well, and you can add stuff between tracks, which we'll talk about in the next video. 13. 13: Okay, let's add a second track. Now. Remember I said, I'm not a huge fan of audacity for doing multi track stuff, but there are some cases when it can be handy. Um, so I'm gonna go to tracks here, add new and then audio track. Now I have another track down here. Now What I can do is, let's say I've I'm working on something and I have want I've got this beat here. I could actually put it down here. Oh, I can't let me show you that error again. So I copied something from my track above, and I'm pasting it down below. And it says copying stereo audio into a mono track is not allowed. So what I did is I copied this, which is two tracks, right? It's stereo tracks that's got to. I tried to paste into one, and it's saying I can't do that. So if I really want to do it, what do I have to do? Have to split this? Let's go split stereo track in my 1st 1 Now I essentially have three model tracks, so now I can do it. Now I can copy something from appear and paste it down there, right? I can put it all over the place if I wanted. Right. So now I'm gonna hear all three, and it's gonna be a cacophony of greatness getting pretty weird. Awesome. I like weird stuff. Um, OK, so that's adding another track. I could do this all day long. If I wanted to. I could add another track. I could add a stereo audio track. Right. Let's try that same process again. So I'm gonna get rid of this track. I'm gonna rejoin these by saying make stereo track. Okay, so now I'm back to having a stereo track. Now, I'm gonna go to track add new and stereo track. Now I have another stereo track. Right. So now I can take this, take something from appear and paste it down here, and I can do it all day long. Here's an editing trick that I like to do. An audacity if I want to do like, this same little snippet like, over and over and over back to back hit paste. So command V for me. Based on that, I'm gonna hit the arrow key over to the right just once That's gonna put the cursor at the end at exactly at the end of what I just pasted, I say, paste again. Arrow key paste again. Arrow key paste again arrow Keep pace to get Eric E. Now I've got this texture going for the whole thing. So let's make it sound even crazier. Fun, OK, One other thing you can do is this duplicate function up here. So what we can do here is we can highlight a bunch of stuff. Let's say let's say this. Now let's say down here, Okay, so we highlight this, and now we can say duplicate, which is command d. What this is going to dio is it looks very quickly like it didn't do anything when I just said duplicate. But if you look down here, there's something new. So we go down there, what does it took all that and it copied it and pasted it into another track. Right, So I have that again. So what can I do with that? I could move it around. I could do some different stuff. I comply different effects to it, um, lots of stuff. So we're gonna look at effects shortly, but, uh, next thing I want to do is look at moving stuff around on the timeline here and we'll do that. Let's jump to another video and then we'll talk about that. 14. 14: Okay, let's talk about moving around these blocks. Let's say I want to move some stuff around in the timeline. Now the timeline is basically this up here. It's our it's our right toe left. Ah, organization of house sound happens in any of these programs. So sound plays over here, and then it goes this way and plays we can when we look at the play head. Theo, that's what we see right? It's playing across the timeline going horizontally here, but I can adjust it. So so far, we've from these tools up here, we've only used this selection tool. But let's go to this tool down here. They call this the time shift tool, which is a little, ah, not the best name, in my opinion of it, because the time shift tool doesn't actually alter time very much. Um, let's just move stuff around, though. So now that I've got that tool, if I click and drag on something, I'm not gonna highlight it like I did with the selection tool. So you over here if I click and drag with the selection tool, I highlight stuff right when I've got this and I click and drag. I move stuff. Right. So now I'm moving stuff in time, I can move these around anywhere where there's an edit is going to get treated as a single thing, right? These air separate chunks so I could move them individually so I could separate those output. That there I could put this over here and do it. If I want to drag these back toe overlap, I can't. Right. So if I really want these toe overlap, what I would do is I would move one of these down to another track, so that could overlap this way. Right? So this will go would overlap with this one, but I can't drag him on top of each other in audacity this way. So I could put these all back to back and then go back to the selection tool. Select all of them. Copy. Let's replace it with this. I'm going to go based there and now back to the time shift tool. And because I've got them all selected, they all move. So now I could do that so that it fills in the gaps there. Let's hear it. That's pretty crazy, but it works. So time shift tool. That's what this is doing. Let's just move stuff around in time, Go all the way back to the beginning and move these. I can't move this one. Right, Because this one if I move it left its at the beginning. I can't go earlier than the beginning. I'm a bit right. It hits up against this one, so I can't move it. Same thing with this one. These can't move anymore until I make some space. This one can could move to there, but it can't move right anymore. Unless I drag it way right. And then it leaps over that other one. Right? So this one can move wherever it wants. But you gotta have space to move it into. Okay, One little of time saving trick you can do here. Ah, is if I hold down the shift key and move one of these things. I move everything on the track. This is really handy, right? So I don't have to have it all selected or anything. I just shift. Move. Writer left. I moved Everything cool. I think that that's that's a pretty cool time saving trick. If you're working on a bigger track Okay. That's our main Ah, sweet. Of the simple editing tools, there's a more complex stuff we can do. Um, but next I want to talk about ah adjusting our volume and doing some editing that way. Ah, volume and panning and things like that. We know that volume is here, right? Weaken, Boost or cut the volume here. And we can alter the panning the right toe left spread here. But we can also automated. And I want to show you that tool in the next video. 15. 15: Okay, let's do some automation Now, You've probably heard this word automation before. If it's familiar to you. Great. Um, we talk a lot about it and ah, my other classes and I'm not gonna talk a ton about it. Now I'm gonna show you how to do it and didn't tell you what it is. I guess, um, automation is nothing except changing a parameter over time. And in this case, let's change the volume over time. Right? So let's say we want the volume to get louder or quieter over time, we could just turn it up or turn it down this way. Right? But that's not exactly what we want to dio. Let's say we want to do it over time. What? We're gonna dio we're gonna go to this tool. So the envelope tool. So you see, when I click on this tool, we get this little light blue line at the top and bottom of each file of each channel, I should say, and I get this weird little cursor. You see, it looks kind of like an hour glass. It's actually two arrows pointing in at each other. So if I click somewhere, I make a point. Okay? Now I'm gonna click somewhere else and make another point. Now, if I go to my second point click and pulled down, you could see what I'm doing to the volume here. Right? So what we see here is a very nice actually representation of what's happening to the volume were scrunching it down, you know, so I can change it. And it happens to both tracks together. So here, I could just do this. I didn't make any point here except for one in the middle. So it adjusts everything. But now I have that point. I could make another one and do that right. Could make a point here and then work before it. If I wanted this one to, like, totally fade in. I could do that. If I zoomed in, it would be a little easier to control. Do. That fades out kind of. Right. So let's fade this one all the way out so you can get a sense of what it's doing. I was gonna happen really quick, but maybe we'll be able to hear it. I'm going to solo this track, so we only hear it. So the rest of these get great out. We only hear the one track, all right, so you can hear what it's doing. You can see what it's doing with the darker grey in the background that it's drawing these envelopes. That's why we call. It's an envelope tool because it opens and closes. It's an envelope could move these back. We can do kind of dramatic things if we want. So it's a handy tool, and I really like. This is one of the things that audacity really kind of excels at. Is this envelope tool? Because the visual representation is so nice, you know, it's so accurate toe what you're going to hear, whereas in a lot of the other audio software, you don't get this kind of a representation So cool. So that's envelope and automation. So we're automating now the volume of ah, this track by changing it over time, we can do it on any track we want, as long as we have the envelope tool here, go up. So adjust your volume 16. 16: Okay, let's talk about the rest of these tools while we're here. So the draw tool. I'm gonna talk about just second. Let me skip over that one and talk about the rest. So we've talked about selection Tool. That's our main tool that we use for cut copy pastes highlighting stuff like that. Our envelope tool We just went through and talked about this magnifying glass. Here is the zoom tool. I don't think I've explicitly talked about this one yet, although I've been using it. So when I click on it and then I clicked somewhere in my timeline, I'm going to zoom in on that spot every time I click. Resume in farther and farther and farther, right. If I want to zoom out, I hold down the shift key and then I click and I'm zooming out, right, so in out You can see if you look really close in a little magnifying glass. Here there's a plus sign, and when I press the shift key and hold it down turns into a minus. So minuses out. Plus is in. So that could be a tricky one to find. If you've been getting frustrated about that so that zoom tool. We've looked at the time shift tool. This tool is called the multi tool. This is gonna try to guess what you're wanting to do. So I've when I've got this selected, I can do envelopes If I put my mouse over an envelope, it can also select stuff at the same time. Um, and I can copy and paste stuff so you can do basically everything all at once, but you run the risk of doing something you don't mean to do so. Ah, it's a little bit more dangerous to use that. But it's basically gonna be guessing which tool you want to use from the envelopes and the selection tool on possibly even the draw tool, which we should talk about right now. So the draw tool, um, this you can't just draw away forms, right? Like I try to draw something and it gives me an heir. Has to use draw. Zoom in further until you can see the individual samples. So and you saw this at the very beginning of the class. I used this toe, alter the samples. So what this is is for literally altering the samples. You've gotta zoom way in. So let's go to my zoom tool on. Let's go away and farther farther There we go. Until I see all these little dots was doctor the individual samples and I am zoomed way, way in. Like if I at play right now, you're going to see the play had zip by. You might not even see it. Yeah, it's just going too fast, really, to know what we're looking at. But now that I'm down here, Aiken draw individual samples in just by clicking and dragging and doing stuff so I can make some pretty crazy way forms doing this. Now, why would you want to do this? A really good reason would be audio repair. Like if you go in here and you see some thing that's like, really weird looking in the way form, you could go in and just re dry it to be more exact and like, smooth it out. Like if you recorded something in the way form look like this. It had one of these in it, you might say, Oh, that's causing a clip sound or maybe a little distortion sound. So you might go in and just say OK, let's smooth this out like that. And now you got rid of that click sound. You don't really hear any difference in that cause, the amount of time it's so small. But you might remove that click, um, which you will be able to hear so that could be one use for another one would be for designing way forms. If you want to just create like, let's go to new. So let's get rid of all that stuff. Well, it's all still there were just looking at a different file. Let's go to generate silence. Do 30 seconds of silence. Sure, let's zoom way, way, way in. There's our silence. Empty wave forms. Try to go back out. One level, maybe two levels. There we go. Um, and now let's draw. Let's draw away for him. Let's just do this. I no longer have a bunch of silence, right? So now I drew some crazy way for him that zoom out. Okay, Now I want to get rid of everything but that, so I'm just gonna highlight a bunch of stuff around it and see if I can get rid of everything else without zooming all over the place. I gotta go out quite a bit more. I should have made, like a one second, um, or less wave form for years. I'm gonna doing a scroll all the way to the end of this Hold down the shift key and then click toe highlight everything in between. So if you highlight something and then you scroll away far away and then hold down, shift and click again You're gonna highlight everything in between. So I delete that Let's go all the way back. There's my sound I'm gonna do the same thing going this way Highlights and stuff Go all the way back to the beginning Hold down, shift and delete So now I have just that sound So remember, what I'm trying to do here is designed my own little way form. So here it is going to tidy it up. I don't know what this is gonna sound like. This could be a disaster. Get rid of some everything else. Now what? I'm gonna dio see if I can hear it. If I just hit play, it's gonna be really too short for us to really make any sense of pies here. A little blip Let's try it, though. Yeah, that's what we hear. But it is if I do this and I'm gonna have to do this. Ah, lot for this to work is probably a better way and to just deploy this out. But let's try to make let's dio 1/10 of a second worst from almost there. Here we go. Now let's zoom out again. This is a pretty tedious process, but I really want to know what this is gonna sound like. So I'm gonna highlight all of this. Gonna copy? I'm going to go over here. I'm gonna paste Lincoln. Do the arrow thing Paste arrow hoops. I'm not getting right at the end. I'm gonna try to get and a second of this because I want to treat this as my own wave form . And in order to hear it, I need a lot of it. Case and I'm way zoomed out. And let's select this whole thing now. It looks like my pasting job wasn't perfect in here, But that's OK, so copy the whole thing again. Let's paste it in there. Just get like, let's get maybe five seconds worth of it now in my sound design class, you'll and you'll see a much more efficient ways to do this. But OK, now I got five seconds of it. Let's hear it. So I'm gonna go all the way back to the beginning with this button. Skip to start. That was kind of cool. So that's the way for my Drew. Remember? I started with silence that I just drew away form, and now we're looping it so much that it's becoming a pitch. Um, pretty interesting. A more efficient way to do that would be to take that way for him, put it into a sampler. So I could have done it just that once. Take that thing I made exported out, put it into a sampler. Either in of E S t or some kind of effect, and then do it that way again. We talk about that in my sampling class. A whole bunch. Ah, how to do that a lot. So this would be a good complement to that, actually. Um, but that's the pencil tool. That's a long way to explaining the pencil tool. Right? We gotta zoom way in, and we can draw our own wave forms, but we've got to be all the way down in the sample based at the sample level to do it go. Okay, let's move on and start talking about some effects. 17. 17: Um, okay, let's talk about effects. So what I've done here is I went back to this original track before I messed it up with our last couple videos. So I've got one whole track in here now, So let's look at what's in our effects menu. That's where we're going to get all of this stuff. So we have basically two menus in one here. We have all of these things at the top, which you should all have, and then all of these. So there's a line and then a whole bunch of other stuff these things you probably don't have now. So what we're seeing here is these effects above the line are the built in audacity effects , things that come with audacity on there's some cool stuff in here. So these should more or less all be the same unless you're on a newer version or a significantly newer version. Um, this stuff underneath is things that are installed on my computer. All my plug ins. Ah, my V s t is audio units. All that stuff, those all come up here. So this could be quite a long list, so I don't actually don't have a ton installed here. So there's these air, the kind of apple ones that come with all Apple computers, some random stuff, and then I have a bunch isotope stuff installed, Um, and a couple other random things. But I don't have much installed here on my main studio computer. I'm working on my laptop now. I'm a main studio computer. This is quite a long list. Um, and that's okay. It would be cool if they were organized into folders somehow, but, um, I don't think there's a way to do that. Really? Um, so let's look at I'm not gonna go through all of these effects in this section. What I do want to look at is a couple of the main ones and how to use them. But this is where we find them, and there's a couple of from ways we use them. So let's try using the amplify. Ah, just as, ah, our starting point. We'll look at using that to boost the signal. Ah, in our track, and we'll jump to a new video to start working with that 18. 18: Okay, so let's select Amplify from our effects menu here. Now, what's interesting about this? Now, I'm not really talking about the amplify affect quite yet. I'm talking about all effects here. Is that when I did that, it automatically selected everything. So it's going to do that for this whole track, right? If I had cancel, I don't want it to do that. I could say, let's just say this section right here is a little quiet. I could select that my own and then go to amplify. And now we're only gonna boost this section, right? Like I could do this. That's this and fight like crazy. Um, And when I hit OK, it's going to be really amplified now, the reason I can't hit okay right now because I have amplified it way too much and it's gonna distort. It's gonna clip, as we say, Fancy word for boosting it way too much. If I want to do it any way I can say, allow clipping, it's gonna say OK, but it's gonna be nasty. And now you can see my way form is just blasting Lee loud in that section. Right? Let's hear it Just for fun. It's kind of interesting in a way, but I don't want to keep it there because it's not very good. So Ah, I'm gonna get rid of it. One way I could get rid of it is always undo Command Z for me, just undo always gets rid of everything. So let's try that again. We can always go to this. Just repeat the previous effect here or I could just did it again. So I'm gonna say, don't allow clipping and to see how allowed to let me go about their I can preview this. Now, this preview is interesting. If I hit preview, it's gonna start playing. It looks like it's gonna run for about six, right? Let's go Stop. So it kind of like renders it on the fly. Now, this is interesting, because the way audacity deals with effects at all is not like how most applications work with effects. We don't put effects on a track. We apply effects right then and there it writes, Um, if we were in a Bolton, we would call this flattening the track like right away, right? It like rights, the effect into the audio. So whatever we select is going to get the effect. So, um, we hit preview, we get a little snippet of what it's gonna do, and we saw six seconds of preview there. And if you want that to be longer or shorter, there was a setting for it up in our preferences menu. So if we go, let's just go find that audacity. Preferences, playback, preview length of previews. Six seconds so we can make that longer shorter. It there. Okay, let's go back to amplify. Okay, so we can say, Let's boost it by 6.2. We will not allow clipping. So that's not gonna let us go really any higher, and we'll do it. And now we see that is significantly boosted. It should sound pretty much OK. OK, so what? It got it in there? Someone undo that. Just leave it alone for a minute. So that's the amplify again. If I don't select anything and just say amplify it automatically selected everything for me right there, so I could say Go up. Let's allow clipping, Say okay and it takes a second to think about it, right, cause it's writing it into the file and now have boosted everything right? I can undo. Get rid of it. You can always go to repeat amplify. It's gonna do it again, and I could undo. I don't want to do that. So that's the amplifies setting amplified just boosts the whole thing, or whatever you have selected. It's gonna boost it, boost the volume. Great. And that's pretty much how all of these effects work. Let's look at a few more. Um, I wanna take special note to these pitch speed and tempo ones, and then we're also gonna look at these fade in and fade out ones. Um, so let's look at the change pitch one next. 19. 19: okay. Using the same process. We're gonna go, Teoh, Change pitch. Now What we want to do here is what this is going to do is it's gonna change our pitch without changing the speed, right? This is a relatively new right that we can do this. So we have two different options for how to do this. We can say from a note to another note. This is for if you know, um, how much you want to change it, This these notes don't matter. Like let's set it to see And then we launching it from C to D. That's changing it by two semi tones, right? That's all that really matters. It doesn't care whether the song is in sea or what noted is at all. It's just a matter of adjusting how maney semi tones it is. So if we wanted to go up two semi tones or four semi tones, whatever, um that's how we could do it. If we don't know how many semi tones we could go down here and do a little bit different. We could say percent change and it's all of these. Adjust that the same time, right? So we could say, I want this thing to be just a bit higher, right? So we could say Go up. You know, to there that's quite a bit higher or I'll tell you what. Actually, I'm going to give you a clue. If you don't understand what the's are, how to adjust from one to the other, Let's say you want a section to be higher, just like significantly higher. Set this to 12. That's gonna put you up in active, Um, and you'll be quite a bit higher. Um, so let's just try it. This is going to change the whole track so it's going to take a minute to process it. All right, let's you same tempo, right? The audio is degraded. In this case, the audio's grated kind of degraded kind of significantly. Um, but that kind of has to happen when you do this change pitch thing. If you change it by upwards of inactive than it's going to be. Ah, little crummy. If I only changed it by like two, so I undid it when I was talking there. So we went back to the original, and now we change it by two. Right now, it's not as degraded, the farther you go way. Okay, I'm gonna undo that again. The same thing applies here If we want to do it for just one section who want to make the world's worst key change, for example, we could say like right here We want this tohave a key change of up One semi tone. This is gonna be like totally eighties power ballad Key change Very elegant, but it works. So that's how you can change pitch ah without affecting time, which is great In the past when we changed pitch we just played it faster or replayed it slower to make the pitch go down. So audacity is giving us tools to let us adjust those things independently. 20. 20: Okay, So what we just did was did this pitch change where we changed the pitch independently of the tempo, And I remember what I just said, that the way we used to do it is if you wanted the pitch to go up, you just sped everything up. If you wanted to go down, you just slowed everything down, right? You put your finger on the record, and that's slowed it down and made the pitch go down. When we use this change speed, that's exactly what we're doing. Um, were not changing speed. Independent of pitch, right? Change, speed, effect affecting both tempo and pitch. Right. So what this one does is changes both by slowing it down or speeding up. This is literally putting your finger on the record style. So if I say make this go away faster 98% we say, Do it. I'm selected the whole thing. Now the pitch right, superfast. So in that change speed, we could go way down to negative 99 all the way up to 400% faster. So stops at negative 99 because what would negative 100% B on the speed it would be stopped . So let's see what 400 does. Okay, that's pretty fast. Um, so that's what changing this speed does. So you can think of this as And, you know, don't forget we've got this preview here, So if I got on the negative 99 hit preview probably can hear anything. Actually, no, we didn't hear anything because it's playing so slow that we didn't even get to the first note yet. Right? Um, because it's really, really slow, but you can get some good sounds that way. Um, so when you look at these three things change pitch, change, speed and change, tempo, change, pitch means we're going to adjust the pitch independently of the tempo change. Speed means we're gonna just both pitch and tempo and change. Tempo means we're going to adjust just the tempo and not the pitch. Right. So let's go to that one next 21. 21: Okay, so now let's select something. Let's let's let it do the whole thing. So let's go to change tempo. So change tempo without changing pitch. Right? So similar controls here we could say percent change or we could say beats per minute or length. This is actually really handy, because what we can do here is we can say it was at 1 20 bpm, and now I wanted to be at 1 30 bpm, and it figures out the math. It says that is an 8.333% tempo change, right? So it figures that out for us. It also says the length is currently 171.5 seconds and will be 157.89 seconds. We could say instead of this we could say the length is 1 71.5 and we want the end result to be an even 200 seconds. Right. This has actually been really handy for me. I'm gonna tell you like an embarrassing secret. Ah, sometimes I have to apply for grants. And in a grant application, they will say you can submit four minutes worth of music. Exactly. No more than that. You can submit less, but no more than that. So I'll put together this, like, highlight reel of the coolest tracks that I want to represent. And then it comes out to be, like, four minutes and 10 seconds and look era. So they just go in here and say, let's make it an even four minutes and then okay, and then it speeds everything up by, like, a tiny amount so that it fits exactly into four minutes. Um, so you could do that. So now we've changed the pitch without our sorry the speed without changing Theo. So it's got kind of a more relaxed groove, their kind of dig it. You do here a little bit of artifacts, and they're the artifacts are like the other weird little sounds that we hear. Um, that come about from from doing this kind of manipulation, you get these extra sounds. And the more extreme you do this, the more of those sounds you get, um, which, uh, can be bad. If you want it to sound really pristine and accurate. You only want to do this pitch or time fluctuation. Very small amounts right to get it to be just right. However, if you want to make some cool, crazy sounds do this at its extremes. Let me show you an example. I'm going to do one. Let's do this whole track. Go change tempo. Negative. 99. Okay, this is gonna make an insanely long file. It's gonna be Ah, basically 20,000 seconds long. Right? I'm gonna do it anyway, so I'm gonna hit, Okay. This is gonna take a long time to process. It's gonna think about it. It might even crash. So I'm gonna pause the video, and then I'll come back when it's done. Okay, I'm back. Ah, that took about 1/2 an hour. Um, that's a lot of computer processing. Um, So here's what we ended up with. Um, let's zoom out here. This is about about five hours long. 5.5 hours long. Let's go over here and look a little over 5.5 hours. Um, that's a big audio file. I guess we should hear some of it. So here's the very beginning. Ah, it sounds a little strange. As you can imagine, It's we've done the most extreme time warping. You can possibly dio um, but I'll explain why it sounds away. Thousands second. So let's just hear the first note way through the first note going into the second note. Um, so the way the reason it sounds like that is because it had to pull it apart so far that we're hearing like thes repetitions of it, using what's called the band. I don't want to get into too much detail about how ah, these time stretching algorithms work. But it basically slices it up into little chunks and then overlaps them to pull them apart . Um, so we're hearing them each of these little chunks over and over and over. Um, but you could kind of hear some really cool stuff that was happening right in here, right? Like it was starting to, like, filter out. Uh, it was actually kind of interesting. So if we just kind of scanned through this, we might be able to find some interesting segment's gonna randomly find a couple spots. It's not bad, you know. So what I could do is select something and say, like, let's copy this out. Let's go to a new file and paste it in. Now we've got just that little chunk, you know? So now we might say, What else could we do to this? And maybe it work on some of these other effects, like reverse. Let's just reverse it, right? That's a simple one. What other effects do we have? You know, there's tons of different stuff I could do to it, but you get the point. So I stretch that out to be an hour or no. 5.5 over 5.5 hours long, and then I'm looking inside for some interesting little nuggets. This has nothing to do with audacity, except you can do it in audacity. And it's a cool trick. I've made a lot of sounds by doing this process of just like stretching stuff way out and then listening for the artifacts and the weird sounds that happened because of that process and then pulling them out, leaving everything else behind and then using that as kind of my template to start, ah, adding effects and doing some stuff to the sounds. So it's a fun little trick. Ah, you can entertain yourself for days doing it, I guess. Um, ok, moving on, Let's talking about Let's talk about, ah, fade in and fade out effects that are built in cause they're super handy, especially if you're gonna be doing like, sampling stuff and putting the other samplers, So let's jump over into that. 22. 22: Okay. Last thing in effects is I want to talk about this fade in, fade out, stuff that's that's built in cause it's really handy. So here's I'm gonna dio let's say I want Oh, let's actually make this a bit shorter. So let's highlight a bunch here, okay? I'm gonna hit delete, so I have just a shorter way for that. I can see in one screen. There we go. Um, now weaken. Do we already know how to do a fade out using the envelope tool? Right? We could make a point by clicking and then pull down and we could do it that way. Right? But there's another way. Go back to the selection tool, highlights something as much as I want. Then effect fade out, Select it, and it automatically just fades it all the way down to zero. And it's gonna do that depending on how much you have selected. So if I select a lot, I say fade out. It's gonna draw this long fade out on it. Are you going to do the same thing going in so I can select something at the beginning? Fade in. It starts at zero. And then lets it fade in, So this could be a handy way to do stuff. The reason I said this is really important if you're doing some sampling stuff. If you want to load this into a sampler, it's sometimes nice toe Have ah fadeout drawn on these sounds If you're working with, like, kind of longer, like washy sounds So let's see this. All right, So a nice fade in fade out pretty quick fade in I could do a long fit in and then a long fade out so that could be kind of cool. All right, that's it. I just wanted to point out this fade in fade out because I find them really handy because they're fast. I can draw a perfect fade in and fade out just by selecting something saying fade in, fade out and then export my track. Okay, those are some of the key effects. There's a lot of good effects here, though that just come right with audacity. We have, um, Samy que effects compression. More e que fate in. You can invert the phase. Ah, level or north noise removal normalizes something that's very handy and very good in, um, audacity lots of other stuff here reverb. Everyone likes good river, so check out some of these other effects that are built in an applying your own effects that you might have installed from plug ins on your computer. But now I want to move on and look at some of the stuff under this analyzed tap because there's some really cool stuff in here that we can do an audacity that audacity really excels at. Um, in addition to some of these of facts, these analysis tools can do some really cool stuff that you don't find in any other program to this extent, So I want to look at those really quick. 23. 23: All right, let's look some of these analysis tools that we have here so I can go toe analyze. And the 1st 1 I'm going to look at is this plot spectrum. So I click on that and here's what we see. Let's drag this window to me nice and big. Okay, so what we see is volume over here and frequencies down here. Now there's a lot of stuff here that we can look at. Um, if you're doing much with mastering, this will be a really handy ah, window to look at if you're doing stuff with audio repair, um, signal processing, even synthesis. This is a really handy window to be seeing. One thing that's really handy with this is as I mouse over different areas like let's see, let's see, like, what is this spike right here? So I'm gonna put my mouse right on it, and I'm gonna look down here at the bottom where it says cursor. It says 7500 to hurts is an a sharp eight. Ah, which means that it's the pitch a sharp, um, in the eighth octave. Ah, it's at negative 33 decibels, so that could be actually really good to know, Because if you have a sound that's like really sticking out in your mix, like if you hear a track and you're like, Wow, this there's this, like Bell that's just like killing me, right? It's like going away all over the place. But you could do is look at this analysis. You could find that bell and say, OK, that is 7521 hurts. Then you could you know exactly what it is, and then you could go in here. You go back to effects, go to an equalizer, find 7521 hurts. It's gonna be right around here and just pull it out right. You'd want to get a little more precise than what I'm doing here. But you could really get down there and find that frequency and probably not pull it all the way out. But at least ah, take away from some of the harshness of that particular sound that you're looking for. So that is one really great use of that spectrum grid 24. 24: All right, let's get another one of these analysis tools here. Let's do the fine clipping. This one is great. For if you've got a mix, you think your mix is good. You think you you've nailed it. Um, pull it into here. Hit this fine clipping and then say where my clipping and any whether you're clipping is gonna show this little array of boxes down here. I'm happy to find that I'm not clipping in this track, But let's clip it. Um, let's do it. So let's get rid of this and let's select a little chunk. Let's go to our effect and amplify, allow clipping. It's go up just a little bit. There we go now. I'm clearly clipping up here, right? Clipping means we're just going our signals, going above the threshold allowed up here. It's going off the grid, right? So now let's go back to our analysis. And now let's go to find clipping. We should see some stuff right underneath that. There it is. So there's these Siris of boxes that are telling us all the frequencies that are are all the places of which we are clipping and we can go through and analyze those and find them. So really, what we want to do here is we wanna keep adjusting, are mixed carefully until we don't get any of these. But when you do have one of these, you can really kind of hone in on it and start zooming in and you see, like it's just showing you, like tons and tons of frequencies here. Like if you only got one and you couldn't figure out where it was coming from, you might be able to do something like this and, you know, pull it down. Although probably not, um, it's still gonna be clipped. It's just gonna be quieter. But that might help you in some ways. But either way, this this tool shows you that you do have clipping somewhere, which is really handy to know. So it's a nice tool 25. 25: Well, let's look at another one of these. And this time I want to look at the Ah, fine. Silence. Silence Finder. Sorry. Click on that with a similar thing. Some settings here to decide what we deem as silence like how long and how low it needs to be. We select it. It says no silence found. Great. So there's no silence in there. And why would you care about this? You might if ah, you were working on a track that had a lot of space in it, you might want to be sure that you don't have any silence. So any true silence, right? Like you might not want it to go down below, like, all the way down to zero. If you are working on a track that maybe you've gotta beat, that's like, really like trip hoppy. And it's got a lot of space to it. Um, if it goes all the way down to silence, it might give you a sound that you don't really want. Um, So what I would do in that case is if it found silence is maybe put like what we call a dither under it, which is basically just a little bit and noise to keep it pushing through. Um, so that doesn't go down to exactly zero. But that's just my opinion. There's a number of reasons why that's that's a handy little thing to find to use, so it's a good tool. 26. 26: Okay, Last one of these analysis tools that I want to show you in for this one. I've loaded up a beat. We're gonna look at this. Ah, beat finder here before I do. Let's just hear this. This new file I've got cute up here, okay? Like really, really simple beat. So let's go to analyze and beat Finder. So threshold percentage. No, this doesn't tell you a lot about what this is doing. But what you'll want to do is if this if the results don't come out exactly how you expect , start adjusting this, and then you'll find how it's it's dealing with what it calls a beat when it doesn't call it beat. Let's say Okay, so now down here, we have all these little beats. So let's play it and keep our eye on this and see if we can figure out what exactly this is telling us here. Oops. Okay. So it labeled all the kicks, right? So it's saying these air where are kicks are now? What good is that? What can we do with it? All? We can do a couple things we can select in between beats nice and easily, so we can cut and copy. Exact exactly on the beats, right and and paste. So that makes it so we can loop beats. We can repeat sections of beats and things like that. The other thing we can do is we can try to adjust our tempo so that it lines up exactly on the grid. So we would want to adjust the temple of our track so that it gets right on the grid, and then we know exactly that we're working on the grid, which is a little tough to do an audacity, but still these Comptel you exactly. I mean, they're basically labeling our kicks for us in this particular case. Um, so these ones are not right. Thes two. So this is an interesting tool. I don't exactly know how best to use it yet. Um, I think it's interesting. Um, but ah, and this just came up in the last version or two. I just saw this today when I, ah updated my version of audacity. So it's a new tool. We'll see where it goes. 27. 27: Okay, let's talk about saving and exporting. So you've made something. An audacity. You're pretty happy with it. You've done some changes to ah, away form, where you've put some bunch of stuff together and multiple tracks. Now you want to get it out. Ah, and export it so that people can see it. So the first thing there are there are a few weird things about this that I want to make really clear. Um, so first, let's go to save. So if we just hit command s or save from up here, it's going to give us this warning. And this is important. Save Project is for an audacity project, not an audio file for an audio file that will open another absolute export. Okay, here's what that means. That means is if I save this safe project's gonna give that warning again. Now, I'm going to save this. I'm gonna call this class projects now. I saved it if I go look at that. So here it is. Class project dot a U P. And here's class project data. So what that did is it saved it as a dot U. P file. That is an audacity project. So that means if you want to pull this in the iTunes or some other media player or post it on soundcloud or do anything with it, that's is not the file type for you. This is saving our audacity project. In other words, our session. This is a session save thing. So this is not what you want if you want toe export it or in other programs that would call his bounce. If you want to bounce the file down, um, you need to goto export, not save. However, saving is important because if we have multiple tracks going and things like that, we do want to save it so that we can open it up and get into our session again. Right? So saving saving it as an audacity project is important. If you ever plan on coming back to it or even if you don't plan on coming back to it saved the project. Trust me, you'll be happy you have it someday, Um, but if you want to export it to get it to its own file type, um, that you can play as an audio file in other APS, you need to go to export so up in this menu Save project and Save Project, as are for making an a u P file audacity project file your session. That's what that is. Um, not to export it to get it into something else. Um, for exporting. Let's look at all our export settings in the next video. 28. 28: Okay, Now let's go to our export settings. So you're all done with a track. You've got everything I'll put together and you want to send it. You want to email it Someone you want posted on Soundcloud. You want an audio file? Right? Um so we go to export. We've got a couple options here. We've got export audio export, selected audio, uh, an export multiple. Let's go to export Audio is gonna bounce the whole thing down. We give it a name. If you're on a Mac, you can give it some tags where it's going to save it. And what format? We have a couple different options. Here. We have a F and wave, our two standard UN compressed file types. You've got a whole bunch of other ones here to that you can play around with. I would recommend a F or wave or MP three file MP three away for a minute. I'm going to come back to MP three because there's something weird we have to deal with with MP three files in audacity that we're gonna talk about in just a minute. Let's save it as an F file. So let's do class Project F. Ah. And now I can hit Save or I can hit options. There are no options for this format. OK, let's try wave file. No options for that format. So some of these others we will have options for Let's try Ogg. So quality etcetera. So ogg I'm not a big fan of Ogg files, but a lot of people really like him. So do ogg files if you like. So I'm gonna say this is class project. Now I get into more information. So these are just tags. Really. This is just some stuff in the comments. So you can say the album track number year genre comments. I don't know why it felt this with numbers, but you can delete it. Type whatever you want here. Ah, you can do some other stuff. I don't know what this template stuff is, but that's fine. Okay, so let's say okay, takes a second and now it's saved. So now if I go down here and here it is, Okay, so there's my track that is now an audio file, that I can do whatever I want with right. It's a big audiophile cause it's an AI file. so there's a couple of months settings there now Select exports. Selected audio is only gonna export what I have currently selected. Right? So if I do this and I go export selected audio and then I get all the same settings class, project clip, Let's call it Everything is the same. But now I just exported that little bit and you see that it went a lot faster that time. So here it is, Class Project clip. And it's just this little middle chunk, right? So it's much smaller. So be aware of that. If you only want to do a segment, select it and then go to export selected audio. If you want to do the whole thing, don't select anything and just go to export audio. This export multiple. I have only one un muted audio track. So what this does is if you have many tracks, you could export each track individually. I only have one track, so it's not gonna let me do it. Um, but this would be like if you were submitting stuff for remixing. You might do this so that someone could get the stems for the track. You could make stems this way. Um, OK, now, in the next video, let's talk about MP three because we have one weird step we have to do with MP threes. So let's be really clear about that and talk about it the next video. 29. 29: Okay, so we want to get our file down to an MP three now. There's a couple different ways we could do this the one way the old way, let's say, would be to take that AI F file or away file that we just made pull it into something like iTunes and convert it to an MP three there. Tedious, right? Ah, but you could do it that way. Now you can get down to an MP three right in audacity, but it takes an extra step. So let's go to export audio. Now, the format. We're gonna say MP three now it's so let's say class project MPs Well, let's call it class project because it will be an MP three. So as soon as I say save, it's gonna give me an error message. Oh, it doesn't. It's gonna let me do it now it gives me the error message. Okay? No, what it's saying here is audacity needs to file Lib MP three lame dot d y l I B to create MP threes, Location of blah, blah, blah. OK, here's what you gotta do. Um, this looks more confusing that it is. Here's what's happening basically under the hood. From what I understand, MP three files are proprietary thing. And, um, the the way to make an MP three the actual, like encoding that needs to be done. Um, the people at an at audacity don't have their own license to do it right. And it's a free program, so they're not gonna go out and buy it, because that would cost him a lot of money. So what they're doing is they're saying, Okay, we don't have a way to actually make an MP three, but here is this software called Lame, which is a very unfortunate title. Ah, but I think it's an acronym for something. So it is what it is. I didn't invent it. Um, So here's this software called lame. I want you to. So this is audacity speaking. Now, I want you to go download this piece of software and tell me where it is, and then I will use it to make an MP three for you. Cool. So let's do it. So we're going to say download. So to get a free copy of lane click here download. It's coming from my browser. Um, did you do So here's the Windows link down here. Is the Mac one okay for audacity? 133 Or later You want that one Kasam downloading it. And now I got it. So I'm gonna open it. And there are instructions for windows here on this page, so you'll see it. So here's lame. Gonna install it, Put in my password. One of the important things is that you'll never have to do this more than once. Once this is installed, it's done. You'll never get this message again. So now I gotta locate it. Now It says this is where it would like it to go, and so it's probably there. So I'm gonna say OK, and it found it, right? So that was right. So all I had to do was run that installer and then say OK, and, um, it put everything together. So now it's making the MP three, and you'll never have to do that again. That's a one time step to install that, um, you'll never deal with it ever again. So let's go back to our desktop. And there is our class Project MP three. So now, forever. If I want to make an MP three, I can go to Export Audio Select MP three class project to just to make this one different, save their my settings, and now it makes the MP three. So you have to do that big step of getting that extra piece of software in order for audacity to know how to make an MP three. That's just how it is. So download it, install it, and then it's easier than it looks. It looks all confusing because they're all these, like slashes and stuff that come up. But don't about it. It's not that hard. Just follow the instructions, do it I just did, and you'll have it done in no time. 30. 31: All right, everyone. That's it for this class. I hope you had fun. I hope you learned Ah, lot about audacity and how to use audacity. And you're making some wicked tracks with it. Leave questions in the comments area. I'm happy to get back to those as soon as I can. Usually, I'm pretty quick about those. So as soon as I see him commit all, I'll jump on him and give an answer. Also, good reviews and a high star rating is always helpful. I don't really get paid to do this. Do this because I like doing it on. If you can leave a good comment in a good star than on sometimes, make a couple bucks on, encouraged to make more, check out some of my other classes and have fun. 31. SkillshareFinalLectureV2: Hey, everyone want to learn more about what I'm up to? You can sign up for my email list here, and if you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make additions or changes to courses you're already enrolled in. Also check out on this site. I post a lot of stuff there and I check into it every day. So please come hang out with me and one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.