Speaker 1: Hey, welcome. I'm here to show you how to use Audacity, assuming that you've never used it before. This is for the very beginners. Now you can see I've already installed the program, so I'm assuming you've already done that. And just so you know, I'm gonna follow a lot of the tips on this website, the tutorial on the Audacity manual for mixing and narration with background music. You can just Google that, but I'll show you how to do it. One thing I like to do right away is make sure that Audacity is using the microphone that I think it's using. Sometimes your computer has different mics, different audio input. So I'm gonna click audio setup here and go down to recording device. And I can see all the ones that are installed. You might be like, I don't know where all these came from. The main thing is that if you're plugging something in externally, like mine, this Yeti stereo microphone, you wanna make sure that you click the one that you think you are. I've had times where I made a whole video and it turns out it was just using that cheap, you know, built-in mic on the laptop and it ended up sounding bad. Now I like to do that before I even open Audacity to make sure there's no problems later on. But besides knowing I'm using the right mic, I wanna make sure it's getting the right volume. And that's what this recording level area is over here. If I move it down, it means that the microphone volume is a little quieter. And maybe you're hearing that. If I move it up, then it's making the microphone hotter and it's picking up more of the sound than I'm speaking into it. The problem is that you can go too far. So what I'm gonna do is right click that little thing and choose start monitoring. And you can see what I'm monitoring. When I speak, it shows up. Now, what I want is that if I'm speaking at the main volume I'm gonna be speaking, I want it to never, ever, ever go past that line. That's called clipping. And it starts to introduce a little bit of distortion that people might be able to hear. So I'm always trying to get it as loud as possible without ever crossing that line. Better to be too low than too high because you can make it louder later. Once I've chosen the right mic, once my volume is looking, you know, pretty good, I'm gonna go ahead and just hit record, that big red button. And if I start doing that, I'll probably actually be able to see a visual representation of what I'm saying right there in the waveform. Hey, it's working. So now let's hit stop and see what happens. Okay, did you see how easy that was by the way? I hit record, I made a recording, now I have a recording. I can even go back and listen to it now. I can use this play button to start wherever I've clicked. You know, if I wanna start from here or start from here, play will start from there. But I can also just click anywhere on this bar to start playing from there. So let's just start playing from right here. And if I start doing that, I'll probably actually be able to see a visual representation. You just heard all that, so I don't need to play it again. By the way, I can also start and stop with the space bar. So if I click here, I can space, I'll probably act and hit space again to stop. Now that I have this here, I will probably do a lot of zooming in and zooming out with these little things there. There's also this really handy one here that fits the entire project to the width of the screen. So if I just hit it once, boom, I know I can see everything in time. And you can see when I say in time, this recording took about 12 seconds because that little 12 is there. If I zoom in and out, it changes, right? The 12 is kind of right there. So let's again, click fit project to width to be able to see the full thing. Now, what I wanna try to do is try to edit in some music underneath this speaking. And I know that often when I'm speaking, because I'm not a professional, often my voice gets a little louder, a little bit quieter. So the first thing I wanna do is kind of even this out so that my recorded volume comes across as pretty even to other people. So what I wanna do is use an effect called compression. Now, the way any effects work in Audacity is that I can highlight things. You can see if I click and hold down, I can say, all right, whatever I highlight, I wanna do the effect to that, or I wanna do the effect to just this part, or I wanna do the effect to this entire thing. Often the easy way to highlight an entire track is to just clicks in an empty space over here. Like if I click in this little empty space down here, boom, I've just highlighted the entire track there. So anything I choose next on the effects menu will affect what I just highlighted. Well, let's check out what effects are available. I'm not gonna go over all or even most of these, but you can see right away that there's these volume and compression ones. They put it up top because I think they think it's most important kind of like I do. And like I said, the one I wanna choose is compressor. Now, if I click it, it might seem a little scary. There's all these options here. You can read online. Remember, I kind of said over here, there's suggested ways to compress. Often the default for an amateur is pretty good. So let's just like hit compressor, hit apply and see what happens. Now that was pretty subtle and quick. So let me undo that with Control Z. Anything you do, you can undo. If you don't remember Control Z, it's also there. Undo and redo. And then I'm gonna redo it again. Okay, undo pre-compressed, redo after compressed. And you can see what happens, right? The spikes are a little bit taller. They're filling up a little bit more of the vertical space. And that's actually good. The higher spikes are, the louder they're going to sound to someone listening to it. The smaller they are, the quieter it's gonna sound. In the same way, the evener they are, the more they tend to hit around the same spots, top and bottom, the more even the sound will be. So that compressor was good. That is gonna make my volume seem a little bit even. If you ever do that and you're like, eh, that still doesn't quite sound right, you can undo it, mess with some of the effects. You can actually do it again. Effect compressor, and it'll redo that. Again, how wise that is or isn't is up to you, but just so you know. But remember, I'm moving quickly here. So let's get another track in here. Let's get some music that I could play along with that speaking. So I'm gonna just go to a Windows Explorer window, anywhere that you have a downloaded file of music already ready. And I'm just gonna drag this in. There are other ways to import audio, but honestly, I feel like that's the easiest way. I just drag it. Now, you might be a little confused at first. You're like, whoa, whoa, where'd my speaking go? Well, that entire speaking that I did, remember it was just 12 seconds long. It got zoomed in here because this whole musical track is three minutes and something long. So in other words, only a little part of my speaking right now is going over all that music. Well, to make this a little more manageable, let's assume that I know I'm not gonna use the end of it. So I'm gonna click and drag, highlight. And once I've highlighted something, I can actually just delete it. Bam, that was it. Now let me undo that really quick and show you a thing up here. There are these tools that I can click and get different tools. What the toolbar means is when I click a different one, different things will happen when I click and drag. So I'm gonna choose the selection tool, which was the default, which is why I was able to select things. So if you ever try to do what I just did, if you're like, hey, I clicked and dragged and I tried to like, you know, highlight something and it didn't work. Maybe you have a different tool clicked up here. That's a really, really common problem. As you get to know Audacity better, you'll find all kinds of different keyboard shortcuts. Like if you click somewhere and hold shift K, it'll highlight everything to the right of what you clicked. Or if you click somewhere and do shift J right next to K, it'll do the opposite. So let's just do that. Shift K, hit the delete button on my keyboard. Whoa, all that audio is gone. Okay, well, remember we need to zoom in again. So I'm gonna use my trusty fit project to width. It's also control F. Okay, that's a little easier to see, right? Now I have my spoken and the audio of the music that I brought in. Now it's still not quite showing me everything. So I can also do a trick under view where I can say view track size fit to height. It'll shrink both of them so I can see everything in my project at once. Don't be worried that my speaking only had one line and the music had two lines. That's because this music recording is in stereo. This is the stuff that happened on the left on one side and the stuff that happens on the right on the other side, but it doesn't really affect any of the things we're talking about today. While we're here, let me show you one other thing. Remember how I highlighted and deleted? There's also sometimes a little bit smarter way to delete in Audacity these days where what if I'm like, you know what? I wanna lose this part of the end, but it's possible later I'm gonna want it back. Well, you can do this thing with the select tool. Well, if you hover over the top part of a track, you can see that little left and right arrow. It's not gonna work if I hover down here. I have to hover towards the top. And if I get it and hold it and drag, I can cut the clip by doing that. Now, the smart thing about that is that now my clip is shorter, but I can also get it back. I can also grab it later and be like, ooh, let's get that deleted audio that's hidden. It's actually not deleted. It's just kind of like hidden underneath it. No one's gonna hear it unless I drag it out longer. But sometimes if you think you're 100% positive of where you want a clip sound to end, that could be a good way to do it. So let's imagine a hypothetical situation where I really want my audience to hear some of this music as background music, but then I want there to be a point where I stop speaking and the music kind of swells up for a moment. You hear that on a lot of radio shows or podcasts where it's like, man, let's give the audience a chance to listen. So in other words, I wanna shut me up a little bit so the music can speak. Well, that means I have to split up this vocal track somewhere. Because right now it's just this one big piece of sound. I can move the whole thing by hovering over that lighter gray part and just dragging it back and forth. Oh, by the way, you see how it's dragging both clips at the same time? I forgot it was gonna do that. That's because of a really useful setting here called sync lock. I can turn sync lock on and off under the tracks menu. Sync lock tracks on and off. Am I getting too complicated? Sorry. If I turn sync lock off, now I can drag one thing at a time. When it's on, it drags both at the same time. So right now I can move this whole track here, but remember, I just wanna move part of it. I wanna split it up into two different clips. Now there are two really easy ways to do that. And both of them involve me clicking with the select tool where I want to split first. Makes sense, right? So I'll click here. Let's say this is where I wanna split. And I always just use control I. Now, if I do control I, you see there's a little bit of a change here. It actually looks slightly different. I can even like zoom in and it kind of, you can see something's happening there. And that's true because now I can drag these separately if I grab onto that kind of lighter gray part at the beginning. Let me undo that to show you another way to get that split. If you forget control I, it's under edit. So you click where you wanna split and you do edit, audio clips, split. And you can even see it says control I, right? Same thing. Now I have two clips. So let's say this is how I want it to work. The speaking will start with the music and then the music will be quiet and then it'll get louder for about that long. And then I'll come back in. Now you notice that we haven't actually listened to these together yet, which I think will show us the clue to a problem that is probably existing. I'm gonna click on the bar right here about the seven and a half second mark and it'll play from there and listen to what you hear. A visual representation of what I'm saying right there in the way. Hey, it's working. Okay, you couldn't hear me at all under this really loud intense music, right? Because there haven't been mixed in a way that lets you hear one along with the other. In other words, we need to make this quieter. We need to make the music quieter. That's one reason I got the volume of the speaking right in the first place to make everything else match that because I know I don't wanna make that louder or mess with that. Now there are a lot of ways to mess with volume in Audacity. There are lots and lots of ways. The way I like to do it the most that I think is kind of gives you the most control is called the envelope tool. Now you remember up here, there was the tools bar and I've been on the select tool the entire time to let me select things and do the things to what I selected. But if I click this one or hit F2, I'll be on the envelope tool. And obviously when I click it, everything looks a little bit different. So it's almost easier to show you than describe what I wanna talk about here. If I click somewhere on, let's say on my music bar, you see what happens is I have all these dots all of a sudden. And what happens is when I click and just let go, that dot becomes a pivot point. So now if I click somewhere else after that and move up and down, everything pivots before, like bigger and smaller after that previous dot. So remember we said that the smaller these bumps, these nooks and crannies are, the quieter they are and the taller they are, the louder they are. So if I do that again here, I click once to make a pivot point and then I click again on the other side, I can kind of in a manual way, drag these to kind of make volume fade in and out over a long way or a short way, or just kind of very suddenly become louder or quieter. So now let's do that same track again and see what it sounds like. A visual representation of what I'm saying right there in the waveform. Okay, you could actually hear me a little bit better. I mean, I still think some of that music is a little too loud, sorry. Let's start at the whole thing here and kind of see what we've got from the beginning. And if I start doing that, I'll probably actually be able to see a visual representation of what I'm saying. Pretty cool, right? Again, that was an informal thing we're just doing quick here to show you, but the basic idea makes sense. You split something, you drag it out, you use the envelope tool to mess with volume. Now I could keep doing that as much as I want, right? I can kind of make more pivot points and go up and down. I can do all sorts of things. I probably don't want to, so I'm gonna Control Z to undo those ones. Remember, like I said, there are other ways to edit volume. So if I wanna highlight something and I go to effects and I go to the volume and compression effects, I can see a few there. There are fading effects to automatically make things fade in and out in really easy ways based on what you highlighted. You can read all about that, play with all of that. It's all there for you. For now, for this super quick intro video, I really just wanna now show you how to save and how to share the audio you've done. You can go deeper with all of your own explorations, your own adventures here. So I'm gonna do file and under there, I can see two different things, save project and export. And those are really important differences. And maybe if you've done audio editing or image editing, you probably have an idea of what this is. If I'm saving the project, that's for me. That's if I wanna go back, probably even on this computer is the easiest way and get to all of these tracks and all of these edits again later, I'll be able to. I don't have to do everything in one sitting, right? But if I'm done with my audio or if I'm to a point where I wanna share a draft for a final version, that's how I would export to give people a file that they can listen to without being able to edit it the way you can if you save the project. So let's do it. Let's save the project. Let's just call it test for video. And you see, it's gonna save it as an AUP3 file. Now, in older versions of Audacity, it would also save a giant folder, but these days it's just gonna save it as one big file. See, there it is, test for video, AUP3. It's about 83 megs so far. It's got these other two files that are open just because the audio project is open right now. When I close it, those will disappear. But again, I don't wanna share that AUP3 file with people. It's just giant 83 gig things. They don't need to edit my stuff. So if I'm sharing it with someone else, I'm gonna choose a version of a file that they can listen to. So again, I'm going to export. Now you have choices about bigger and smaller ways to export files. The second one there, export at wave is gonna give you a high quality file that's gonna sound exactly the way that it sounds on your computer. It's not gonna be compressed or anything, but it's also gonna be a really big file. So if you have a lot of space, if you have a short project, you might wanna export as wave. But if you're thinking, you know what, I have like a long podcast or something that takes up a lot of space or I don't have a very big flash drive or I don't have much space left on my Google Drive or my Dropbox files, then you might wanna choose MP3 or OGG. You might not have heard of OGG as much. Often it kind of sounds better than MP3, but with a little bit less space even. Still, maybe you've heard of MP3, so let's pick that one. So like before, it's gonna ask me, what do you wanna call this? It'll default to whatever I call my project, testforvideo.mp3. And you see there's these questions down here about what kind of quality you wanna use. In other words, even an MP3 can sound better or worse. So the larger the number, the better it's gonna sound. These days, I would probably say, if you're saving as MP3, choose the biggest one. Same for if you choose OGG, it's gonna give you different options, zero to 10, it's not the same kind of scale, but again, use the biggest one you can, why not? You also have the option here about, do you want the project to be mono or stereo? Usually, unless you have a reason that it has to be mono, there's no need to check that. So this is pretty standard, okay. Constant, pretty high number, joint stereo is fine. Don't worry about all those details unless you wanna look them up. Let's hit save and see what happens. Well, it's bringing up this box saying, edit the metadata tags. And what that means is when someone opens this on their phone or an audio player in their computer, they're gonna see information that is beyond just what the file name is. You know, I could call this file 11111.mp3. I mean, you shouldn't, because then you won't know what it is, but I could. And then when they open it, it could have the info that I fill in in this metadata showing up in front of them, kind of saying, oh, okay, yeah, this is this. The problem though, is you see that Audacity is automatically filling in the info of the song that I put in, not the actual info of this project that I made that might've just used the song. In other words, I don't want people to play this and think, this is the Don Juan Quartet. No, it's not. It's a podcast featuring the Don Juan Quartet. So I'm gonna hit clear, clear all that out. And you can actually just hit okay and save it without including any of this, or you're able to. So I could say, this is my name. And I could say, this is a test for a video. If you wanna add other things, you can. All right, let's hit okay. It might think for a second. It actually didn't show us thinking it for a second, but hey, let's pull this back up and see. TestForVideo.mp3 is now exist. It's only 626 kilobytes. It's much smaller than that AUP3 file, even though it'll sound somewhat the same for people who listen to it. Remember that they just won't be able to actually edit that if you send that to people. And honestly, that's it. That's the whole idea. It's that easy to get started on Audacity. Hey, let me know how it's going in the comments below and maybe we can get a conversation going about how to make you awesomer and better editors of audio. Thanks, bye.