Mastering Audacity Fast for Podcasting & Recording (2025)

1. Introduction: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Audacity. Audacity is a program I've been using for a long time. I'm really excited to share it with you. Again, actually. I made an audacity class, like, I don't know, seven or eight years ago, and it was so popular that I had to make it again because audacity has come a long way in the last seven or eight years, especially in the last two years or so, actually. So in this class, we're going to cover how to use audacity from as many different angles as we can. I'm going to show you how to record with it using my voice and my guitar. We'll talk about how to do podcasting with it. We'll talk about how to do editing with it. We'll talk about how to use external plugins to get the best sound out of your recordings. We'll talk about mixing, mastering, and exporting your projects from audacity so that you get the best sound as possible. Audacity is a great program for all of these things. So join me. Let's learn how to use it. To take 2. About Your Instructor: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Audacity. I'm excited to do this program again. I made a class on using this program, I don't know, a while ago. And it's gone through a lot of changes since then. So I'm going to redo the whole class now. From scratch. Okay? So this isn't like an extension of my previous class. This is everything you need to master audacity. So, who am I? If you've never taken one of my classes before, my name is J Anthony Allen I have a PhD in music and audio stuff. It's that right. Oh, this is hard there. That's my PhD. That's a master's in electronic music. That's a master's in composition. This is, I don't know, some award from the Society of Electroacoustic Music in the United States, and that is painting. Enjoy it. I am a composer, producer, sometimes engineer writer. I've written a couple of books that you can find on composition and writing music. I have a couple albums out. One of them was in top 20 on the CMJ charts. I've written for major orchestras. I've written for TV and films. I've done a lot of stuff. I was a university professor. I ran a music technology and music business program at my previous university. And last year, I left to focus on online teaching full time. So I do lessons, one on one lessons over Zoom, and I also make classes like this. So, welcome. I have about 130 some online classes I've made now. It's a lot, but I like making them. They're fun. The music I make, if you're interested, I do a wide variety of things. Right now, I'm working on a big project of solo piano music and a big project of electronic sort of synth wave like music. That's what I've loaded here. I'm not going to play you a whole one of my own tracks, but I'll just give you a little taste. More on that soon. So, I'm really excited to be with you here to talk about audacity. In this first section, I just want to tell you a little bit about audacity. It's a weird program, kind of how it came to be. We won't spend too much time on this, but I just want to talk about it really quick so that you can understand the frequency of updates you should expect and things like that. So let's go to a new video, and let's talk about the weird background of this program. 3. Background: Who Owns Audacity?: Okay, so audacity has been around for a long time, actually. It was a free open source program since I don't actually know when it started, but it's been around for at least ten years, probably well over that, actually. Now, as an open source program, what that meant was that there are still a lot of open source programs around. But what that means is that there's a whole bunch of people that are contributing to building this program and this tool out of necessity. A bunch of audio developers said, We don't have a great open source audio editor. So they donated their time and they built this program. And they made the source, like the actual code, open, so anyone could get access to it and change it, make improvements, make their own version. So that's the way it was for a long time. Now, not that long ago, a company came around called Muse. I think it's mu SE, and they essentially bought audacity. Now, how does that work? I don't know. I don't really know how you can buy an open source program, but somehow they did. And now audacity is part of that. The program is still free, but a company does own it now, so they're going to try to squeeze some money out of it. So we now see things popping up like extra packs and effects and things you can download and buy for it. But for now, I just re downloaded it to test this. For now, the program is still free. This exact same thing happened with MuseScore, if you're familiar with the MuseScore program, and it's the exact same company that bought it somehow. So this is what they do. I don't think it's bad, necessarily. We'll wait and see what becomes of it. But so far, you know, MuseScore but so far, audacity has got a handful of improvements since they've taken it over. So so far so good. Alright, let's do a quick, like, 50,000 foot view. What can we actually do with audacity and more importantly, what can't we do with audacity? 4. What Can You Do with Audacity?: Now, when it comes to now, when it comes to audio software, software for audio production, there are really two kinds of apps that we use a lot. The first is called a DA. This is a general term for an application, and it's an acronym. It stands for digital audio workstation. These would be things like Pro Tools, Ableton Live, Logic Pro, FL Studio, Bit Warden. There's a ton of them, actually. Those are the big heavy lifting programs. And for me, I use Ableton Live as my main da. But then there's another kind of program that I just kind of call wave editors. That means that what these programs are good at is looking at a single wave form and letting us do some edits to it. So we can zoom way in and adjust like individual samples. We can zoom way out and maybe layer a few things. But we're not typically going to build whole tracks with a wave editor. It's just a little too cumbersome. So for me, I would consider audacity one of these programs, this kind of wave editor program. You can do full production in it and make your own tracks from scratch in it. However, I would not advise doing it because you're going to be in kind of a world of pain if you want to try to do that. It's just not designed for it. So audacity works best kind of in tandem with one of those other full featured Da programs. Now, even though I said I wouldn't produce whole music in it, it's not that I wouldn't make stuff in it. Audacity is great for recording, like, a live recording or record adding single tracks here and there. We'll probably do that later in this class. It's great for podcasting, where you just have a few tracks that you're keeping track of, like, maybe two microphones and then, like, a background music track or something like that. It's great for that. It's not bad for mixing, and it's reasonably good for mastering, actually. We'll talk about that near the end of the class. Okay, let's talk a few minutes about versions. Okay, let's talk a little bit about versions and versions of audacity to clear up a few questions you may have about that. 5. Versions: Alright, in this class, I am using audacity version 3.7 0.0. Now, if you're using an earlier version of audacity, you're probably just fun to keep up with me in this class. There's going to be a few things that look different, but more or less the features are almost all the same all the way back to audacity two. However, if you are on an earlier version, since it's a free program, go ahead and update. Update so that everything matches mine. If you are watching this class like a year after I made it, there may be newer versions. I would suggest to you if there are later versions, get the most up to date version. That's always a good idea for professional software like this. And I bet that there's really only a few things different, so you'll still be able to follow along with this class. If there is a major update, I will update this class and make new stuff. So just keep in mind that we're hovering around audacity 3.7, but newer or older versions, you should be able to follow along in this class just fine. Okay, I also just want to point out really quick before I forget Audacity works on a bunch of operating systems. There's a Windows version, a Mac version, and I think there's a Linux version, too. To my knowledge, there's not a tablet iPad, phone version of it that exists. Maybe there is, but I'm pretty sure there's not. Hm. In this class, I'm going to be using the version on a Mac, but they work really almost exactly the same on PC and even Linux. So you're welcome to use whichever you like. 6. Installation and Setup: Getting Configured Correctly: Okay, if you haven't yet, let's download it install Audacity. So the first thing we need to do is go to the audacity website. That's audacityteam.org. Okay? Once you're there, you can click on the Download button for your particular operating system. Now, a new thing that just happened that I noticed is that it asked me to download this use hub. So that's this program. So I downloaded this use hub, and a lot of apps are doing this now. If it's a company that has a bunch of apps, they're downloading, like, a hub, and then you actually download the programs from within that hub. So the hub is its own program. So you're going to download and launch that, and it's going to look like this. Okay. Then you can download all these programs. So most of them are free. Here's audacity, so you're going to click Download, I already did, so it's there. So it just says open for me. But there are some other programs here. I don't know what most of these do, but there's some cool stuff. Here's a bunch of free stuff. Woodwinds, drum line, use percussion. That's cool. I haven't tried those out yet. Maybe they're good. But open this download Audacity, okay? Then you can close this use hub thing. And you've got audacity. After it installs, double click, and it'll launch right away. Or it might tell you to drag it to your applications folder. So just follow those instructions, and then you are up and running. Now, the only setup thing we need to do is our audio inputs and outputs, like getting audio into audacity and getting audio out of audacity. Let's deal with our inputs later. Once we talk about recording, we'll focus on those inputs. But we do want to be able to hear what's in it. So let's set up our outputs. Our output means our speakers or our headphones or whatever we're using to listen to audacity. So we're going to go to this audio setup button right here. And we're going to go to Playback Device. That's output. So what are we listening to? So for this, you won't have this many stuff in this list. What you have in this list might be something like built in output, Mac studio speakers, um, ASIO stuff, things like that. Whatever you normally set as your, like, audio listening thing, select that. I would normally select Universal Audio Thunderbolt. That is an interface I have right there to handle my audio for me. However, I have to keep it on Telestream Audio capture if I want you to be able to hear it for this recording. So just keep that in mind. When you see Telestream audio capture, it's just for recording my recording purposes. Set that to whatever you want it to be so that you can hear it. If you're not sure, try a few different things and get it to where you're hearing it correctly. You don't need to worry about your recording device or channels until we get to recording. Now for host, you're going to want to select core audio if you're on a Mac. If you're on a PC, you have different options, and I don't exactly know what those are, but it should be like your default audio stuff. That's all you really need to select there. Alright. Let's get started and talk about importing audio into audacity. 7. The Interface: Okay, so what I have here is I have audacity with just how it is when you open it up for the first time, and the only thing I've done differently is I've added an audio file here. We're gonna talk about how to add an audio file in a few different ways, actually, in just a minute. Yeah, in the next video, actually. So just hold on to that for a second, okay? That's how we get this big audio file in here. But I want to jump the gun a little bit and just kind of walk through the interface real quick, okay? So I'm not going to go over every single button, and that's kind of a philosophy for this whole class and how I teach in general. We're not going to memorize what every single button does in this first class. If you want to get more advanced into it, you're welcome to explore every little button. But for now, we're just kind of getting to lay of the land, figuring out what does what in this program. So let's look at basically the three areas of the program. Okay? We have this top bar. We're gonna call that the transport bar because in most DAs that's what you call it. Even though this isn't exactly a DA still gonna call it transport bar. Down here, we're going to call this the timeline. We have time passing here. We can position stuff in the timeline however we want. Cool. And then down here, we have sort of a session information, let's call it. So starting up here at the top, up here at the transport, we have our main controls to pause, play, stop, play from the beginning, jump to the end, record, and loop. Now, whenever you see these little six dots, that means you can move stuff. So you can really customize this however you want. So I could take this and I could say, I want that to be like way over here, or even down here, I think. But I'm not going to do that. Whoops. Oops. Well, I did it. This happened to me earlier. So this moving stuff around thing is not super reliable at the moment. But it's okay. You can move things around however you want. Here, we have a little tool palette, right? This selector tool is going to let us click and drag to highlight stuff. That's what I usually keep it on all the time unless I'm doing something different. This is our breakpoint editor tool. It calls it the envelope tool, which is fine. It's going to let us do some automation like things, making the volume quiet and louder. We'll go over how to do that in a lot more detail shortly. So I'm going to undo that. This is the pencil tool. It's going to let us just draw waveforms, which is a crazy idea. It doesn't work exactly how you think. You got to actually be, like, super crazy zoomed in for it to work. But I'll show you how we're going to do that. A shortly. This is the multi tool. This will let you do any of these three things with certain key commands. So control option, and command. You can kind of get through things using those. That was a Zoom in I just did. I don't use this tool very often. I like to stick with this, but you're welcome to get good at it. Moving on, we have varying levels of Zoom. Zooming is kind of important here. And other editing tools. These two are going to let you kind of trim audio in specific ways. This one is trim the audio outside of the selection. So that means it's going to leave this and chop off those things like that, and I can hit Undo, and this one is going to do the opposte, right? So those two are there. This is undo and redo. Zooming in on different ways. Okay? And then we have our audio stuff. We're going to go into this in a second, too, but if we click and hold down, this is where we set our inputs and outputs and all that stuff. We'll go over it more in a minute. Share Audio is a new thing that I think they've just incorporated. This is going to let us create a feed of our audio directly to somebody else over the Internet. Now, we have to have a audio.com account for this to work, and I haven't explored that yet. So it looks cool. But I haven't tried it yet. This is our input monitor. So if I turn this on by clicking here and enable silent monitoring, we can now see my microphone coming in after we turn that. And down here is our output. If we play some tunes, we're going to see it the volume come back show up over here. Right? And we can scale that back. We can turn it down, basically with the dot. And turn it back up there. Okay, in our track, we have the info on the left. Mute, meaning that we're not going to hear this track. Solo, meaning we're going to mute all the other tracks and only hear this one. Effects, we're going to get into effects shortly, but this is where we will add effects. And then we have our panning and our sorry, our volume and our panning. We're going to go through how to deal with all of those shortly, too. Here we have blank space. This blank space is where we can put more audio, another track if we want, whatever we want to do with it. And at the bottom, we have our track tempo time signatures, if we're going to snap to the grid, and if we are, what is that grid, I usually leave snap off in audacity, and I usually don't adjust the tempo or the meter. All that's going to do is change your timeline up here. It's really not going to change your audio. So you're working if you're trying to use audacity as a full sequencer, make sure you set your tempo and time signature correctly. But if you're just trying to do mastering with audacity or or work on certain audio files or record like a podcast or something. There's really no reason to mess with this. This shows where we are hours minutes seconds. We can adjust that to be different units of time if we want. And then this is the selection. So this is going to show me what's selected. So right now, if I select this much sound by clicking and dragging, it says you selected 16 seconds, and it starts at 7.2 seconds, which is right there. And this down here is our playback speed. If we want to play with that, we can adjust it here. Dope. I'm going to set that back to one. And so that's our basic interface. There's a whole lot of stuff in the menu at the top, though. Effects, analysis tools, other tools. We'll get into some of those more later. Oh 8. Importing Audio: Okay, so let's talk about getting audio into this program. Now, you'll see here I have three audio tracks that I can move around. I just set it up that way. Let's start fresh. So I'm going to go Command for new. I'm going to close that old one. Don't save it. Okay, so when we have a new session, it looks like this. There are essentially three ways we can get audio into the program, okay? The first is just dragging an audio file in there. The second is going file import audio, and then the third is recording audio. Let's do the first two in this video, and uh oh, actually, there's a fourth way. We can tell audacity to generate some audio. Okay, so we'll do the first two in this one, and then the next video, we'll do generate audio, and the one after that, we'll do recording audio. That was weird. So basically, the two ways that I want to tell you about right now are dragging audio in or importing audio. So we have our main timeline is right here. This is the main guts of the program, right? So I am going to find. I am going to find an audio track. Let me just pull in that one I was using. Let's just grab one of these audio files for this kind of synthwave project that I'm working on. Alright, so I'm just going to drag a file in here. Okay, so this is a file I can work on now. We're going to talk about editing this file soon. But I have a track in here. I can put my cursor somewhere. I can click, and I can hit the space bar to play. And then the space bar to stop. I can also use the transport up here, play, stop, pause, jump to the beginning, jump to the end, record, and loop. You can see our audio output up here. And we can scale it back a little bit if we want by just pulling that down. Think of this as our master volume up here. Okay, the other way to import audio would be to go to File Import and audio. Okay, now I got to go through guitar clean doubled. Let's just see where it randomly open to. I actually think I know what this is. Okay, I'm going to solo this track, which means I'm only going to hear audacity. I just want to hear what this is. I think I. Yeah. What this was is, so I'm a guitar player, and I had a friend who is a producer, who's working on a track, and he's like, I need this chord, like this very specific and kind of weird chord, but, like, strummed for this one spot of this electronic track. So I recorded myself doing it like 20 times and sent him a bunch of takes so he could use it in his track. Doing it in a bunch of different ways. Anyway, so the two ways I've shown you here to get audio into audacity is to go file, import audio, and or just drag a file in there. Even if we already have something set up like this, if I take another audio file and just drag it in here, I can drag it over here and it's going to put it on this track. If I drop it right here, I'm not sure if it's gonna put it at the end of this track or do nothing. Oh, it put it on a new track. I'm going to undo that because I just want to show you the smartest thing to do if I want to add another track is drag it onto this dark gray area. That's going to make a new track and load it. 9. Generating Audio: Alright, let's get rid of all of this. So now I've got three tracks here. I could get rid of these tracks by clicking this X and this X, and maybe the sex too. Now let's do the third way that we can add audio, which is by generating something. So if I go to generate at the top here, I can generate a chirp, which is like sound. DTMF tones. These, I think, are used for broadcasting. They're just ways to help us sync up audio and video, not terribly musically useful. Noise, a little pluck, a rhythm track, that's new. A reset drum. That's a specific drum, silence and a tone. Let's select tone. We can say, Okay, I want a triangle wave at 4:40 hertz at amplitude oh eight. That's going to be piercing. Let's quiet that down, and then we'll hit generate and now we're just going to get a tone. I actually do this all the time in audacity to show students waveforms, because if you zoom way in and I'm zooming by pinching on my track pad, you can actually get so deep in here to see the waveform, right? Like, I'm looking at milliseconds now, and there's my waveform. You can actually even go farther and see individual samples. Each one of these is a sample, right? And I can be like, I don't like that sample. Get rid of it. What did I do? I don't know. Probably nothing audible because we're so zoomed in here. Alright, you can also zoom in, zoom out with these things up here, these tools. Let's try that rhythm track. Let's go to generate Rhythm track. Let's see. Presets, factory preset, defaults. Tempo beats for a minute. Swing them out. Let's give it some swing. Number of bars. Beat sound. Metronome tick. Sure. Alright, let's see what we got. Okay, so this would mostly be useful as, like, maybe a metronome or something like that, if I took the swing out of it. But you can generate stuff all the time, if you want. Not a whole lot of super useful stuff, but a couple of things. Alright, let's move on to talk about recording. 10. Recording Audio: Alright. Let's do some recording. So, I have one of my tracks here and I'm going to put a guitar part on it. Didn't intend on having a guitar part, but it'll be fun. And I kind of like audacity for this for just giving me a really simple, like, I'm going to record a guitar track. There's no quality reason that you would do this in a full dot or in a wave editor type program like audacity. We're doing digital audio recording here, so it's going to go in the same in either program. They're going to sound just as good. So a couple setup things we need to do. We need to go back to that input device. So I'm going to go audio setup recording device. This is what's our input. So for this one, I'm going to select Universal Audio Thunderbolt because that's what this guitar is plugged into, okay? So this is plugged into Universal Audio Thunderbolt. And then I need to go to recording channels. Because into my thunderbolt, I have two things plugged into it. The first one is this microphone. The second is this guitar. So if I set this to one, I'm going to go up here and I'm going to click on this and say enable silent monitoring. Okay? Now, all we're seeing is this mic. So I could record a vocal take this way. I've got my mic in there. So I could sing on this track. But you don't want to hear me sing. So let's go to audio setup and recording channels two, because that's where I have this guitar. So now if I do that, We have this guitar. Now, there's a couple audio things here that you might want to know. The first is, what is this audio Thunderbolt thing that you're talking about? That is an audio interface. It lets me plug in stuff. You can get an audio interface if you want. It's definitely going to give you better recordings if you plan on recording. If you're doing podcasting or anything like that, you may already have one. Some mixers have them built in. But basically, it's a little box that's going to let me plug in a microphone or maybe two or three microphones, and it's or instrument or anything like that. And then it's gonna send a USB out to my uh computer. Okay? That's called an audio interface. If you want to look for one, There's a couple that I recommend. I might encourage you to check out my intro to music production master class. That we talk about all of this stuff, like all the gear that you need to buy and hardware. But if you just want to look one up, a really good, cheap model that's inexpensive, but works great, sounds great, is this is not sponsored. I'm just going to say it is the focus right scarlet. That's kind of the go to one for, like, inexpensive, but reliable and sounds good. So check that out. It's probably like you can get the smallest one for probably, like, 200 bucks, maybe. If your computer just has inputs, just has, like, an eighth inch jack that you can just plug into, you can experiment with some of that. You can also experiment with USB microphones. Maybe I'll do a USB microphone in just a second and set that up. But first, let's put some guitar on this track. So I'm going to go to Tracks add new Mono track. Mono means we're just recording one thing. So this guitar is basically mono unless I'm running it through some special effects. Now, I'm going to record it dry, and then I'll put some amp modeling on it after. So here we go. Um, Let's enable that so I can Alright. That's looking pretty good. So I'm just gonna hit record and see what happens. Here we go. Dope. Alright, let's see what we got here. So, this recorded it as a stereo track. So I think this top one is this microphone, and this is my guitar. So let's convert it down to mono track, whoops, which is here. I could split stereo to mono. That should do it. Yeah. Now I can just delete this track. Now I have just my guitar sound. Let's hear what I got. Okay, what we're hearing here is that there was quite a bit of latency between what I've played and what it recorded. Latency means the amount of time it takes for the audio signal to get all the way through all the gear and the interface and the box and into the program. That can be like half a second, which is a lot in music. So there's an easy solution to that. I'm just going to line it up. Easier to, like, cop Okay, we don't have a very lovely tone there, so I can't wait to fix that. We're really close. Okay, so now it's lined up. When we get to the effects section, we'll put some effects on it to make it sound like a big distorted guitar. In the meantime, let's keep moving on. Ing. 11. Recording with a USB Mic: Okay, so we're recording with a US B mic, like, this is a USB mic. Microphone that has USB outputs at the bottom. This particular one also has sort of a regular audio output at the bottom. But these USB mics, Work great. I used to, like, really poo poo on these and say they were just not up to the quality. And for some of them, that's true, but some of them are starting to sound really good. So the USB mics are getting better. They're getting pretty great, actually. So if you have one of those, just plug it in, make sure you've installed any drivers that it might need. And then if you go to audio setup recording device, you should see it in this list. Okay? Now, there's one other really fun thing that's here that I want to show you. You can use your phone. If it syncs to your computer wirelessly, you can use it as a microphone. Let me show you how you do that. Well, I'm going into it kept giving me an error when I turned on the phone thing. So and then the phone doesn't come up in deeper into our settings here. So I'm gonna say that's an experimental feature. I've never tried it before and it doesn't seem to quite be working yet, but it'll be cool when it does work. Okay, let's go on to some basic audio controls and terminology. 12. Basic Audio Controls: Alright, so while we're here and we've got some audio, let's look at our basic audio controls here. They're over here on the left. And so what we've got is mute. That means we're not going to hear this track at all. Click it again to turn it off. Solo, that means we're only going to hear this track. Effects. Now, this is where we can add effects to our track. We'll come back and do that in a few minutes. So let's close that for now. So here we can boost our volume. And here we can control the panning. Panning is the left and right. So this means that most of the time, when we're listening to music, we're listening out of two speakers, and that's designed to emulate our two ears, right? So the panning moves the sound between our two ears. Okay, so those are just some of our very basic quick audio controls, panning, volume, mute, and solo. We'll be doing more on editing in just a few minutes. I just want to get us through some of these track options. With that, let's talk about some specific options we have for audio tracks. 13. Audio Track Options: Okay, now, each audio track has some special options that will be really handy to us. And we can get those options right here in these little three dot things. So first, we can rename the track here. We can move it down. We can move it up. If it wasn't the topmost thing, we can move it up. We can move it to the bottom. There's really no reason to do that, other than organizing your session. Multi view. Multi view is going to show us the sonogram at the same time, let us do some sonogram work, okay? We're not going to talk too much about the sonogram stuff in this version of the class. But there are some cool sonogram tools for, like, very advanced users. So I'm going to go and turn that off. Oh, spectrogram. Sorry, I think I said sonogram. I meant to say spectrogram. So we can see just a spectrogram here if we want, and there are some processing that we can do to the spectrogram. If you want to explore that, go up to effects, and you can find some spectral tools here. That's what we'll use the sonogram, the spectrogram stuff. But back to our menu here, you can change some settings about the spectrogram. Let's go just back to waveform. You can change the color of it, swap stereo channels. So what we have here in an audio track, this is a stereo track. You can see that there are really two waveforms, right? There's a left and a right. Down here, if you look at my guitar recording, this is a mono track. There's just one waveform, right? So in this one, if we wanted to swap stereo channels, meaning the left becomes the right and the right becomes the left, we could do it with this. That's actually oddly useful. You'll be surprised at how useful that is. Split stereo track means that we can take this track as a stereople and convert it to two mono tracks. That is also sometimes useful. If, for example, we want to do some noise reduction or things like that. Splitting to mono tracks is really handy. We can also change our format here and our sampling rate. If you don't know about bit rates and sampling rates, here's what I think you should do. Leave it on 32 bit float and leave your sampling rate at 48 or 4,144.1 or 48,000 Hertz. One of these two, and you should be just fine. Alright, let's talk about Mi files for a minute. 14. What About MIDI?: Alright, so what about MDI? When we learn a normal Da, like Ableton or Pro Tools or something, we are often talking about MDI. Like we can record and play MIDI. Now, we can't really do that in audacity. Audacity is an audio editor. It's really good at editing audio. It's not so good at MIDI stuff. There are a few midi things we can do. We actually can import a MIDI file, but there's not much we can do with it. If I go to File Import MIDI, then I point it to some MIDI file, it does give us a piano roll editor and the ability to do some things, but it's pretty tricky to work with. To zoom way in. Can't really get my hand on individual notes. Maybe I can if I switch tool. And if I play this, there's really nothing. There's really there's really nothing to hear. I probably could set up a synthesizer in here to play this. But this really isn't a strong suit dealing with MIDI. So I would recommend if you want to do MIDI stuff, you're probably going to want to switch to a full sequencer program that can handle that. Audacity is not for you if that's what you really want to do. We can't, to my knowledge, record. If I go to Tracks and add new, there's no Mi track. So if you want to do midi stuff, maybe think about doing it in a different program and maybe export it as audio, and then you can pull it into audacity. 15. Cut/Copy/Paste - Just Like Text!: Alright, in this section, let's talk about editing. So editing means we're gonna cut up audio. We're going to arrange it in time. We're gonna move things around, get rid of things we don't want, add things, maybe. We'll see how it goes. So the first thing to remember about audio editing, and this is true, actually, kind of, no matter what program you're in, is that all of our what I call Microsoft Word commands still work. So like, cut, copy and paste. So if I was, for example, to go to the beginning of this and say, I want to take this and copy it. So I highlight some things by clicking and dragging and then Command C to copy, and I go somewhere else, like the end, click here, Command V, and I paste it in. Now I've just got that little chunk. I can grab anything, copy, paste, put it there, and then I can grab the top part, the title bar. If you want to move it, you have to click up here where it says the name of the track, and you can move it. Anywhere that there's not audio, when we play it, it's just going to be silence, right? So silence in these empty gaps. So we tend to not want those, so you might smash those up. Now, this isn't going to sound very good because I randomly copied and pasted something. So I'm going to select this by clicking on the header and press the delete key. Same thing with that. Now, if I want to cut something, let's say I want to just, like, make a little break right there. I can just press the delete key after I highlight it. And now it's kind of smooshed it together. Okay, so what it did there is what is sometimes called a ripple delete, where it deletes it and also compacts the space, right? That's often what we want in this kind of editing, where we're trying to find, like, very small things and just like a person like a tick or an audio imperfection. We can just zoom way in and say, like, Oh, that little things sticking out right there I don't want. And I can delete that. That's going to be an inaudible amount of time that I just delete it. It's great. So cut, copy, and paste work just the same as anything else. Now, if you wanted to delete something and leave the empty space, let's say you wanted something right here. What you could do is go to Edit menu and go to this remove special and then cut and leave gap. You can also use Option Command X or delete and leave gap. Okay? So let's highlight something and then say, edit, delete and leave gap. Now we've got that gap there. Okay? So that's the way to do the other one. All right. Now let's talk about adding a second track. 16. Adding a Second Track: Now, we've already added a second track, but let me go over just how to do that again and how to move things between tracks. Let's leave this audio one track. I was just about to delete it. But one thing I can do is paste between tracks. So if I go up here to this little segment, Command C to copy and click somewhere in here, Command V, so it's giving me an error saying that you're trying to paste stereo audio into a mono track. So let's, in fact, get rid of this track or we could just turn it into a stereo track right here. Okay? Now it's a stereo track, and it seems to have absorbed my guitar part. That's interesting. Let's undo that. Command Z. Now let's just get rid of this track and make a new one. Add new Stereotrack. Okay? Now I can go up here, copy that, go down here, paste it, and then adjust it where I want it. Okay? So you could in theory, like, build a beat or a whole song by arranging things like this in the timeline. Again, that is not audacity strong suit. But audacity is good at working with these big chunks of audio, like, arranging big chunks in time. And it's also good at that, like, zooming way into one little audio glitch and like, deleting a millisecond. But it's not good at, like, moving snares and high hats around and, like, making a beat. It's not awesome at that. But arranging big chunks of audio, like for a podcast or something like that, it's super great. Alright, so let's talk about the time shift tool for some more advanced editing. 17. Time Tracks: Okay, audacity has some time shifting tools that work a little bit different than other um, audio applications. If we want to mess with the time, that means like speed up and slow down the track and play with it that way. Here's how we do it. We go to Tracks, add new time track. This is weird, okay? Now, you'll see here, think of these numbers as percentages. 100% means we're doing nothing. Okay? So I'm going to click on this blue line to make a point and click again and make another point, and we'll go like. Maybe I'll make another one and another one and go like that. This is called a breakpoint Editor, where we make points on a line and that changes things. What happens is here we're at 100%. Here we start going up. That's going to make this thing go faster. It's going to get all the way up to 200%. That's twice speed. And then it's going to stay there for a second, and then it's going to go beep, all the way down to, I don't know, it looks like maybe 20% of the speed or 10% of the speed. That's going to sound like this. The Weird and fun. Now, if you're like, Can I do that without changing the pitch? Yes, there is a way to do some really interesting time shifting and pitch shifting independent of each other. We're going to talk about that in the effect section next. But for now, I want to stick with this idea and talk about this breakpoint editor a little more because it's the foundation of what we call automation. So let's learn how to do some automation in audacity. 18. Automation: Okay, so this little breakpoint editor up here gives us kind of a sneaky clue and do some other things we can do. And that is automation. So, if you've taken any of my other classes, you know that my standard definition for automation is changing a parameter over time. That's all it is. And we can automate just about anything. Let's automate our volume. Now, the reason we'd want to do this is, let's say we want the volume to get louder right in this section. Okay? That's easy enough to do. We're going to go to our automation tool, which they call the envelope tool now. I'm going to click on it. You're going to see a line right in the middle here. Here we go. It's kind of on the outside, right? So what we're going to do is we're going to leave that nice and big. We're going to go where we want it. Go make a point and then another point. And we want to get that audio. Let's say we want a little quiet. Let's say we want it a lot quieter, just for dramatic effect. So I can control the ramp to it. I can control, you know, how long it takes to get there. And then, you know, I can make another dot and get out of it. So we grow back to where we were, which is maybe there. So, Audacity doesn't give us a lot of automation controls. We can't do much more than volume with automation. But we can do that, and that's the most important one. Alright, so next let me show you the draw tool. This is gonna let us do some freaky stuff. And this tool is not one that we see in other audio programs. This is kind of unique to audacity. 19. The Draw Tool: Sample-Level Editing!: I realized I didn't play this for you. So if I go back to our selector tool up here, I just click somewhere and hit Spacebar to play, you'll hear this automation. Okay, I got real quiet. Then at the end, it's gonna get louder again. Oh, and our speed's gonna go up. Now it's getting louder, but slower. Whoo. Alright. So next, the draw tool. That's this little tool right there. Now, check this out. This is designed to let us just draw stuff, but in order to use it, we got to zoom way, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa in. We got to get down to the individual sample. If I try to use it out here, it just says to use draw, zoom in further until you can see individual samples. So here we go. Let's go out here somewhere. Okay, so we're zooming in. We're zooming in. We can also click up here. Click, click click, click, click, click, click. Not quite. There we go. Individual samples. Now, check this out. I'm just going to draw my samples, right? If I want something that's going to sound like distorted and gritty, I'm going to do that. But you also have to keep in mind that what we're looking at here is like milliseconds. I could just go crazy with this. But watch.Oce I zoom out and listen to it, it's going to be very, very short. Okay. Let's listen to it. It was right around here. Hear that. That was what we just drew. Okay. Neat. So you can do stuff like that. Why would that be useful? If there's a certain kind of distortion you want, maybe you could draw it in that way. You could also go in and do some noise reduction that way. Like, if you saw, like, maybe this right here, like, that's like way loud, right? Let's see if we can I think it was right here, maybe. Okay, so let's say we don't want this to go up that high. So let's grab our pencil tool and just give it a little bit of a haircut. Try to round it off to reconnect, maybe. Maybe smooth that. There. Now, I don't think that'll be audible, but it'll get rid of if that was a click, this would get rid of it. I just kind of flattened it out. I don't think that. Yeah, we didn't really hear it. But that's what it's good for. Okay, let's talk about effects. 20. The Effects Menu: All right. Next, let's talk about effects. So we've already seen this button up here, right? So if we click this button, we get to our effects section. So we've got two different things we can do. We can put effects on the track. This is Track four. That's what this one is called. Even though it's not the fourth track, it just got called Track four. That's okay. Or we can add master efeteffects that are going to go on everything, okay? This is going to be we're not going to really do this until we start mastering, we might use it. But up here, let's add an effect. So let's go to some of the built in effects, and down here they have more. These VST effects, we'll talk about in a minute. For now, let's just add something like let's add a distortion to our guitar. I'm going to go down here. Now I'm on Audio two, which is correct. Add effects, audacity, distortion. Let's also add compressor to that guitar sound to boost it up a little bit. So if I click on the compressor now, I can dial it in. Let's see what presets we have. Ooh, all kinds of good stuff. Let's go here. I want to make it a little more extreme. The user interface The actual user interface on the audacity effects and just audacity in general is not awesome. There's some really cool stuff in audacity, but it's they spend more time on, like, the algorithms behind stuff than, making the user interface all, like, sexy and cool. Alwy, let's do, like a medium overdrive on this guitar and check out our tone here. Solo it. Whoo. Alright, so we are pushing that compressor way too hard. Okay, that tone needs a lot of work. So but we're not going to spend too much time on it now. So I think we're getting that pretty good. I'm going to do a little bit more with VST when we get there. But for now, this is what we got. Alright, I actually really like that guitar. It, adds a lot of warmth to this track and kind of an organic feel to it, too. Okay, let's talk about a few of the effects. I want to talk about the amplify effect just as an example and then some of the spectral effects. So let's go to a new video and talk about amplify. 21. Realtime and Nonrealtime Effects: Okay, I should have mentioned there's a third kind of effect here. What we have here is real time effects on our channel and master effects on the master channel. So they will affect everything. But then we also have something unique to audacity, as far as I know, and that's non real time effects. So what this means is that I can select some audio, let's say, Let's say this part. Let's just select our whole guitar part. And then I can go up to the effect menu at the top, and I have all kinds of new stuff, right? This stuff doesn't show up in the real time effects. So these are different. Now, the difference is that non real time effects obviously are not real time. So I can't just turn them on and then run the signal through it. Non real time effects, I have to, like, highlight something and tell it process. The computers go to think about it for a second. Then it's going to give me the result, and then I can listen to it. It's kind of old school. It's how we used to do things all the time. So let's try. There's all kinds of cool stuff here, but let's try amplify. So let's take this. And there's some presets. How much do we want to just boost this signal? We can allow it to clip if we want, but I don't. So it's not gonna let me apply here because basically it's saying, you are going to clip this if you do it. Okay, that's gonna let me do it. And now I have a nice healthy signal that I can turn way down. Great. Non real time effects. 22. Changing the Pitch: Okay, earlier we looked at this time track as a way of playing with the speed and things of the audio. And I mentioned that there's a better way to do this where we have independent control of the pitch while we do it. So let's talk about that. So let's select Let's do something a little more obvious, like, right here. Okay? Now, this is going to be a non real time effect again. So I'm going to select something. I'm going to go up to effect. And then let's go to pitch and tempo, and I can change pitch. I can change speed and pitch or I can change the tempo. So let's start with pitch. Now, changing pitch, this is not autotune. Okay? If you want an autotune kind of thing, you want the pitch to be in a key or something like that, this is not it. If you want to do autotune like things, then we're talking about a VST plugin, which we'll get to shortly. This is just going to take the whole audio and make it go up or down in pitch without changing the speed. Now, I could go into all of the cool audio math that's going on here. There's things called FFTs happening. There's, you know, complex math happening to make this work. And this kind of complex math is relatively new in the audio world. Like, ten years ago, we couldn't do this. Now we can do it fairly commonly, and we can even do it real time in some cases. This particular program doesn't do it in real time. So, let's say, let's look at our two options here. In the top, we can do it in pitch, and the bottom, we can do it by frequencies. Both do the same thing. It's what is easier to think about. For me, pitch is easier to think about. So it says from B to B. What I like to do is say, Well, let's assume this is in C. It doesn't matter if it is or not. And I want to get it to the key of D. Okay? So what that's going to do is transpose it up to semitones, because that's the key of C to D. Okay, now it's not going to affect tempo or anything. Now, if I say use high quality stretching, I'm going to do that. In general, when you're doing this kind of stretching, you're going to degrade your audio. So anything we can do to lower the amount that we're degrading the audio because degrading the audio means you're going to get like weird what we call artifacts in the sound, just weird, like, things, sounds in it. So we're going to use high quality stretching. That's going to make it take a little bit longer to process, but it's going to be more accurate. The amount of time it's going to take to process is like maybe three or 4 seconds. It's really not long. So use the high quality. Cool. Here we go. Apply. There, I did it. That's non real time, right? Like, it happens super fast. So, here it is. Before I play it, note that where I have selected, right? Like here, when that selection ends, it's going back to the original key. So let's listen to it for right about here.'s try it again. Whoa. Alright. So you want to be careful with that tool, right? I'm gonna undo that. If you're really doing it, I'm gonna select the whole track. That's what you might want to do it for. Okay, now let's talk about changing the speed without changing the pitch. 23. Changing the Tempo: Alright, now let's try to change the pitch without changing the speed. And let me just sidebar and say, today's water is ginger citrus twist. Was not excited about the ginger citrus twist, 'cause I'm not a big ginger guy, but this is delightful. Not not a paid post. Anyway, um that was my random to for today. Okay, so let's select something else and start playing with the pitch. Let's go let's just select this whole thing. And now, again, non real time effect. So we're going to go to pitch and tempo. And now let's go to change tempo. Okay. So what we can do here is we can say percent change. What percentage do we want it to change, right? We can adjust that there, or we can say, Let's assume it's 100 beats per minute, and I want it to be 120 beats per minute, right? I could do that. That's just another way for it to figure out the math. What I really like to do with this particular tool, and this is where it comes in the most handy for me is go down here to the length because I do a lot of work where someone says, I need a track that is exactly 90 seconds or something like that. And so maybe I wrote a track and it's 91 seconds or 92 seconds. So I'm going to go here. I'm going to go, Whoop 90. I'm going to make this exactly 90 seconds. Now, this is going to speed it up or slow it down. Yeah, it works both ways, like a little bit so that it fits perfectly in there. Now, if I do high quality, it's not going to get too glitchy, and it's going to sound normal. So if you're ever doing something and you need exact timing for music, then this is a good way to do. With one caveat. The one caveat is that the more extreme this time is meaning, the more drastic you're shifting the time, then the less real and less good it's going to sound. Okay? So this is 48 seconds long. This clip I just highlighted is 48.11 seconds long. And I'm going to change it to 90, so that's about double. That's going to be a lot. So we might get some artifacts. I would not try to do this big of a time stretch in a serious track, but let's do it just so you can get an idea. In fact, let's do it really long. Let's do, like, a super long one. This is going to take a second, literally. Okay. Oh. Oh, it said it didn't have enough room because this was in its way. So let's do it to this one. Okay? Effect, change tempo 39-147. Sure. Pop. There it is. Alright. Let's listen to it. Listen for artifacts or anything weird. I kind of love it as, like, ambient music. That's pretty extreme stretch. So it sounds all kind of weird. So this kind of stretching is good for, like, a couple seconds here and there, or for really extreme stretching for, like, sound design purposes, like what we just made, I might actually save that and use it in some of this ambient music that I'm working on lately. 24. Changing the Speed and Pitch: Okay, let's go back to this first chunk, and let's go to effect. Okay, now let's go to changing speed and pitch. Now, this one is kind of like what we did with our time track. This one is going to change them together. So we can change the speed. So speed multiplier. Or we could say, like, what if it was a vinyl record, and I played it at 78 when it should have been 33 and a third. That's that big of a change, another way of looking at it, or current length and ending length. But this way of doing it is going to change both the pitch and the speed. So this is kind of the same as the time track. So that's generally not the one that I want to do. It's kind of like putting your finger on a record to slow it down. The pitch is going to go down and the speed is going to go down. So that's the old school way of doing it, right? But we have all these cool new ones. Great. Okay, a couple more effects. Let's talk about fade ins. 25. Fade in and Fade Out: Okay. Okay, let's go to the end of our track, and let's say we want a nice fade out. This is there are many reasons to do this, not all of them musical. Like, if you're doing dialogue or you're doing anything, just fading out to zero is a really good habit to get to on the end of any track because you prevent clicks and anything weird like that. So here's how I'm going to do a really quick and easy fade out of my track of any track, actually. I'm going to go to the end, and I'm probably going to zoom in a little bit. This fade out can be as short and as long as we wanted. Weird voice crack. Okay? So that's the end. I could say this is going to be a slow fade out, and I could go, I don't know, select all of this. Okay? Now, this is a fade out that's going to start here and go to zero by the end. This is non real time, so I'm going to select something I'm gonna go to fading. I can say fade in or fade out. So two fade out, there it goes. Right? Just drew it right in. And it's gone. I can go to the beginning. And now I'm way zoomed in here. So maybe right here, I don't want a long fade in. What if I just want a really tiny fade in here? Like milliseconds. Zoom way in. Like way in. And let's just do that, okay? This is going to be a super fast fade in. It's too fast to be audible, but it'll prevent any clicks. So this is just a good habit to do for anything. So I'm going to go fading, fade in. Okay? Now I've got a nice smooth fade into this track. If I start it at the beginning, you won't even hear that fade in. Of course, because it glitches out. Not there at all. But it makes a nice, clean entry of the music, and it sounds great. So both on a production level, get used to doing that. Those are good habits to have, but on a software level, audacity makes it really easy to do. So it's great. 26. Plugins: Okay. There's a very important concept, and this is true in Audaci and it's also true in just about every de I've ever used. There's another kind of effect that you can use in this program called plug ins. Okay? So let's talk about plug ins. What plug ins are is they're their own program. You download them, you buy them. There's a bunch of free ones. You can find them all over online. There's millions of plug ins. But what's important to note is that these plugins are not made by audacity. They don't come with audacity. They don't have anything to do with audacity. It's just a thing that every computer knows how to handle plug ins. So what you do is you buy a plug in. So let's say you bought a plug in that was going to emulate like an old cassette tape, okay? So you bought this cool plug in that's going to emulate your music being played on an old casettetape. That's great. Now you're going to install it on your computer. You're not going to install it for any specific program. You're not going to install it for Pro Tools for Ableton, for audacity. You're going to install it on your computer. And then any of those programs that are running on your computer will have access to those plugins, okay? So if you get into plug ins, you buy a few cool plugins, and you put them on your computer and you use them with audacity, then in a year from now, you decide to upgrade to logic, for example, once you launch logic, you go to plug ins, you're going to see all your plug ins there, right? Even though you install them and use them with audacity, they're installed on your system. Okay? And they're their own little programs. So here's how I get to them. I'm going to go add effect VST three. Now, there are a few different kinds of plugins. There are AU plugins. There are VST plugins. Audacity likes a kind of plugin called VST three, which is the kind of new version of VST. I think if we go to our effects menu, we'll get even more plug ins here. That can be used in a non real time way. So underneath this line, these are all the plug ins that I've installed on this computer, which is a lot. Like, if you get to some of these lists, these are, like, long lists, right? So I've installed a lot of stuff 'cause I do this professionally, but you might have nothing here, and that's okay. Search around, find some cool effects. Find some cool plug ins. Um now, if I go to VST, let's use this plug in, okay? This is called sketch Cassette, and this is the exact plug in I was just talking about. This is supposed to make it sound like you've recorded this music to an old cassette, and then you're playing it back in. It's going to add some like wobble to it. Let's do it. So I select Sketch cassette. And now if I click on it, I can see the sketch cassette interface. This is going to look totally different than audacity, because it's a totally different program that's running inside of audacity. So if I just set this over here, and then I hit play. There it is. Let's make it sound like an old tape. Who. Page of the tape. Some defaults. High School mixed tape. Let's count of how they sounded. Cool. So this is just a random plug in that I saw online, and I said, That looks awesome. I could totally use that for some of my projects. So I bought it. I don't remember what I paid for it. Probably 20 or 30 bucks. Some plug ins are huge and cost a fortune. Some plug ins are nifty little things like this that cost 20 or 30 bucks. And some plug ins are free. Search around online. You'll find a lot of great plug ins. O 27. Guitar Effects: Okay, so I'm going to go back to my track four here and I'm going to get rid of the sketch castte. I could just turn it off here, or I could get rid of it by just writing no effect here. Okay? I get rid of that. But let's go back to our guitar part. And let's see if I can use any plugins that I have that might be specific to guitar stuff to get a good tone. So I'm on that track. I go to Adeffcs VST. Now let's see what I have. That might be a good um Guitar effect. Here is a fender tweed deluxe amp emulator. I like this plug in because I have a fender tweed amp, a hot rod devil. It's actually right you can kind of see it right there. And this plug in is an emulator for that amp. So saves me a whole bunch of time from lugging that amp out. Actually, that amp is doing something weird and it's really noisy and buzzy right now. I need to go to the shop. But I can use this, and it's okay. So this interface is fun and cool, but it's all active. I can adjust the tone. I can even change my inputs if I want. And, you know, where the mics are, how they're positioned, what kind of mics I'm using. It's great. So let's try. Let's see what our guitar sounds like through this. But I do want to go back here. I'm going to turn off this distortion that we added earlier. So now we have a halfway respectable guitar tone. Let's listen to it in context. Hopefully, I didn't mess this up too much where it doesn't fit anymore. I did. It doesn't fit anymore. Not bad. So those are some of the cool things you can do with plug ins. Alright, let's move on to talk about mixing and mastering and exporting and audacity. Oh 28. The Mixer and Mixing Techniques: Okay. Here we go. Alright, let's talk about finishing a song or a track. In audacity. So first, mixing. Now, both with mixing and mastering, I'm not going to go over in this class, a whole detailed Lesson on how to mix and master, we're going to focus on how to use audacity here. But I do have other classes that are all about mixing and mastering. I have a huge class on both of those things. And in both of those classes, I use Ableton, but I do everything in, like, a nonspecific Da way. So I walk you through how to do it in any program. So I encourage you to check out those. So let me talk about how I'm going to approach mixing in audacity and some things I might think about. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to look at the mixer. Audacity does have a mixer. If you go to the View menu and then down to Mixer, we get this, okay? There's not a whole lot here. It's pretty simple, but it's everything we need. So let's get to a spot where there's a lot happening maybe like, right here. Alright, this is soloed. Let's turn that off. What are you doing? All. Okay. So we can adjust everything we need to adjust here. We've got our panning here. We've got the name of our tracks, a weird little icon. I'm not sure what that's doing. And our volume. So we can do a lot of our mixing here. Other tools I would use in mixing would be the compressor effect and maybe an EQ. And those I would all use as real time effects. And then I would balance using the mixer here, making sure everything stays out of the red. Your master volume, which you can see up here is in the yellow, then you're good. Let's take a look. Alright, we're just touching on the yellow here. There's the yellow. So we could be anywhere between negative 18 and negative six, really. Anywhere in this range, if everything's sounding good in that range, then we've got a pretty good mix. And then we'll use mastering to get us all the way at full volume, okay? So let's talk about mastering techniques in audacity. 29. Mastering Techniques: Now, for mastering, this is a little different. I actually think Audacity is kind of good at mastering. If we let's actually just take for a minute, let's take a new session. Let's drop a track in it. So here's a different one. It's like a quick listen just the beginning. Switching out. Okay, you get the point. So if I wanted to master this, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to have this one track here and I'm going to focus on getting this to sound as good as possible. So first, I'm going to click effet so I can get to here. I could do effects Because I only have one track now, I could do effects on the track or on the master. It's going to be the same because there's only one track, right? Let's put it on the master. And the effects I'm going to use, again, mastering is a huge art form. I'm not going to teach you how to master in one video in this class. In mastering, some of the tools we use are tools we've already looked at. We use compressors. We use EQs. We use things called exciters sometimes. We use more EQs and we use more compressors. There are other tools in there as well. My favorite tool to use, though, for mastering is a plug in, so I can use it in audacity, just fine. But it's made by Isotope here and it's designed just for mastering. It's kind of like a single plug in that does everything you need for mastering. It's a great tool for mastering. I encourage you to check it out. Now, we'll load here and you can use it to master your tracks. It even has some AI mastering tools where it'll figure out some of the hard stuff for you. So, I have a whole class on how to use ozone, by the way. Check that out. Check out how to master. You can do it using your master effects right here. 30. Bouncing and Exporting: Okay, once we're all done with our whole session in an audacity, here's how we get it down to a file that we can play with. We have to do something called bouncing. Now, this thing, bouncing is called something different in just about every program. So programs call it render, bounce, export, Share logic, I think, likes to call it share. We can still save our session so that we can open this session up and keep playing with stuff. But when we're done, we're going to export this as a single audio file. Okay? It's different than our session. So here's how we do it. We're going to go to File and export audio. Okay, now, what they're saying here is we can share it to audio.com if we have an audio.com account. I have no idea what that is or why you'd want to do it, to be perfectly honest with you. So we're going to master it or we're going to export it to our computer. So export to computer. All right. So what are we going to call it? Let's call it um funky Groove. Maybe if you're very studious, you're going to put the date in it, something like that. Where are you going to put it? Now, what kind of file do we need here? We have all kinds of options. So you can export this as whatever kind of file you want, but let me tell you some of the purposes for some of these files. AIF and Wave those two are the kind of gold standard for high quality audio files. Are going to be your highest quality thing, okay? I used to be that AIFF was Apple stuff, and wave was Microsoft stuff. That's not really true anymore. Both operating systems can handle both files pretty much fine. Wave has become a bit more common, though. So if you're exporting as a full quality audio file, Wave kind of is a great one to use. So AIF and wave are the full quality. The rest of these have some degree of compression on them, meaning they're made smaller. The files are made smaller, and that means they're not as high of quality of audio. However, most people can't hear the difference. So if you want to make an MP three file, it's right there. Og files are a unique thing to, like, the og player. I don't really ever use those, but a lot of people really like them. They sound really good, supposedly. Same deal with flack files. I don't know what an MP two file is. I think it's a video file, actually. And then here's just other things that you can do. Honestly, I only ever use Wave and MP three. If you use MP three, you may be prompted to download an extra thing. Um, And if you are, just follow along with what it says. Sometimes you need to download another extension to make MP three files. But let's make a wave file. So it's stereo. This is our sample rate. This is our encoding, our bit rate. You can leave that. Those should be fine right where they are. You usually shouldn't have to change those, even if this says 41. If it's 41 or 48, you're good. Entire project. Trim blank space. I'm going to leave it out entire project. This metadata stuff won't really matter here because wave files don't really support much metadata, as far as I know, but MP three is do. So if you export it as an MP three, you can put in metadata here. That's going to be like the composer name, the producer, the artist names, the copyright, the track, just a bunch of texts. Okay, so let's export that. This sometimes takes a minute for your computer to think through everything and save it as one file. That's how we do it. Now we have a file, and you can upload that file directly to SoundCloud, Apple Music, Spotify. You need to have an account in order to upload those to Apple Music or Spotify. If you're interested in doing that, check out some of my music business classes where I talk about how to do that in full detail. But for now, let's talk a little bit before we wrap up about podcasting, I know this is a really popular app for podcasting. So let me just show you how I'd set it up for podcasting. 31. Setup Options: So audacity is quite popular for podcasters, so I thought we'd talk about how to do it. So first, how do we set it up? So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to just set it up to record audio. Let's assume we've got two mics, okay? So I'm going to make a new track, stereo track. There it is. Now I'm going to go to my audio setup and say recording device. That's the right thing. Now, in that, I'm going to assume that I have a microphone plugged into channel one and channel two, two microphones. So recording channels. Two. Okay? Now I can hit record, and I'm recording on channels one and two. Now, I actually only have a microphone plugged into channel one. So two is empty. But if you had two microphones going, this would be how you would do it. Okay. Now I'm going to rename this just to be tidy. And I'm going to name it hosts, maybe two people. And then maybe we're going to set up another track for Soundtrack. So maybe this is where you're going to drag in all of your audio files, music, anything like that. Now you can mix between the two, control the volume of your effects, and you got yourself a bodcast. Next, let's talk about a couple of editing tips. 32. Podcast Editing Tips: Okay, so editing a podcast, couple of things. First of all, for your soundtrack, if you need another a second track to because you've got a lot of soundtrack elements, that's fine. You can dit. But I would try to do it in one track if you can. For editing the voices, one thing you might want to do is separate these voices. If there's things where, like, we need to cut out something that one person said, but not the other person, then we should probably separate these. It's going to be a lot easier. Here's how we do it. I'm going to go up here, I'm going to go to split Stereo track. Okay? Now I've got two files, right? So now I can say, whoops, that was a goof, select something, and let's delete it in that way that leaves the empty space. So that's going to be Edit remove special and then and leave gap. We could probably remember that key command if we're going to do that a lot. Now I can move this around and I can move that around and do whatever I need to do. I can cut out stuff like that and delete things. So maybe this was a cough. Get rid of that. So be sure you separate those tracks, though. They're going to be a lot easier to edit. 33. What Comes Next?: All right. We've reached the end of this class on audacity. I hope you learned a bunch of audacity. I hope you're able to achieve everything you want to achieve with it. It's a really cool program. It's a really valuable utility. I'm glad we have it. So, what comes next? What if you want to go farther. You're feeling pretty good about audacity, but maybe there's some things with it that you're feeling you can't quite do. In that case, I'm going to encourage you to take a look at logic, Logic Pro. You may also consider Ableton Live. That's a really good tool if you're looking for a more full fledged production tool. So check those out. I have classes on both. I'll give you a bunch of info about how to get some more of my classes on the cheap in the text stuff at the very, very end of this class. But in the meantime, when you're looking for the next thing, consider Logic Pro. What could you do right now? If you're into podcasting, I do have a whole separate class all about podcasting that includes getting everything on the podcasting networks and all of that stuff. So it's distributed on Apple and Spotify and Amazon and all those places. It's quite easy to do if you know what you're doing. So you might check out that, too. Okay, one more video for me, and then we're off to the races. 34. Bonus Lecture: Hey, everyone. I 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 in one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.