Speaker 1: Hey there, my name is Travis, head of content at Buzzsprout, and in this video, I'm going to show you how to record, edit, and export your podcast episode using Audacity. So when you open up Audacity, this is going to be the screen that you see. You're going to see this big area here where our tracks are going to be, and then up here you have several different tools, some meters so you can monitor the volume levels, but what I really want to draw your attention to when you're first getting set up is these four drop-down menus. This is where you're going to control the microphone that you're using, what kind of audio you're recording, whether it's mono or stereo, and how you are sending your audio out, whether it's to a set of headphones or back to the interface or mixer that you're using. So for this example, you can see that I have core audio selected, it's the only option, and that's what you're looking for. Over here, I have the option of using my Scarlett 2i2, which is what I'm currently recording into, or the MacBook Pro microphone. For here, I just have it set to mono recording channel, and I'm going to show you why that's important here in a second. And then for the output, I also have it set to the Scarlett 2i2, so the sound is feeding back into the interface, it's not coming out through the speakers. Now if Audacity does not recognize your microphone, if you click on this drop-down menu, and your interface or your microphone does not show up, then the first place you want to look is in your Audacity Preferences. So if you go to Preferences, you have all these different options, and under Devices, you want this recording device, you want your microphone or your interface to show up in here. If it does not, if it does not show up in your Preferences, then the easiest thing to do is, one, make sure your microphone is plugged in, I can't tell you how many times that's happened to me, and then just restart Audacity with everything plugged in and turned on. Often it just takes Audacity refreshing and reading what the default microphone is for your computer when it opens up, when it boots up, and that becomes the input that it has here in the drop-down menu. If it still does not see your microphone or your interface, then you'll want to go into your computer system preferences, whether that's your Windows computer or your Mac computer, and make sure that your computer is recognizing your microphone. And now we're ready to go. Now we are ready to start recording our podcast. So when you're ready to record your episode in Audacity, it's pretty simple, all you do is click this recording button or press R on your keyboard. So now we are recording in Audacity, you can see that the waveforms are forming nicely. Up here we have the voice level, the level meter, showing that I am exactly where I want to be, which is between minus 12 and minus 6 decibels with my peak. That's the sweet spot, that's where you want to record. And yeah, everything sounds great, everything looks great, so I'm just going to hit the space bar on my keyboard, and it'll stop the recording. That's all you have to do. It's pretty simple, pretty straightforward to record in Audacity, and now I can edit this recording, I can add to it, I can add tracks, and do whatever I need to. Now if you want to record multiple microphones into Audacity at the same time, there is one setting you need to be aware of, and it's this one. This drop-down menu for mono or stereo recording channels. So my Scarlett 2i2 USB interface has two XLR microphone inputs, and so if I were to switch this to stereo recording channels, X out of the audio track we just recorded, and switch this to stereo channels, now when I record, it will record one stereo track, but the left side will be one microphone, and the right side of that stereo track will be the second microphone. So even though it's recording both microphones at the same time, to the same track, we will be able to split it after we're done. So let me go ahead and hit record with two microphones plugged in, using my Scarlett 2i2 USB interface, and show you what that looks like. So now I am recording into microphone one in my Scarlett 2i2 USB interface, and you can see a little bit of bleed down here in microphone two, that's totally normal. But now I'm going to switch over to microphone two, and now I'm switching into my Heil PR40, which is the other microphone that I'm using. And so you can see that it's recording both microphones on their own tracks, and then here in a second I'm going to split them to create two separate tracks, which is going to make it a lot easier to edit the final episode. Alright, so now that I've stopped my recording, I'm going to split this stereo track into two mono tracks, that's going to give me two different audio tracks that I can edit independent of each other, which is what you want. So if you go to this triangle up here next to where it says audio track, click the menu, and then you go down to split stereo track. That's going to create two separate tracks, one for each microphone, and now I can edit them individually, which is pretty sweet. And this will work for any USB interface that you're using that supports multi-track recording. You simply use this drop down menu, select two stereo recording channels, and then it'll record two microphones. But what if you have more than two microphones? Let's say that you're recording four microphones in something like the RODECaster Pro, which is a podcasting mixer. So now I'm going to switch over to the RODECaster Pro, and show you how you can record as many tracks as you want. Okay, so now I have the RODECaster Pro plugged into Audacity, I've changed my drop down menu to be RODECaster Pro multi-channel, and same thing with audio out, going out to the RODECaster. Now over here, before you remember the Scarlett 2i2 had two options, mono and stereo. But the RODECaster Pro has all kinds of tracks, including the first four microphones, some Bluetooth connection, the sound pads over here. So it's got a bunch of different tracks that I can record in Audacity. So what I have to do though, in order to capture those things, is to set the number of tracks I want Audacity to record. So I only need the first four microphone tracks to be recording. So what that means is I have to select six, because the first two tracks are going to be the stereo mix, where it brings everything together into one stereo file. So this will be the left and the right. And then this is microphone one, microphone two, microphone three, and so on. So I'm going to select six, and then when I start recording in Audacity, you'll see six separate audio tracks. So let me record and show you what that looks like. So now, Audacity is recording six tracks from the RODECaster Pro. The first two are going to be the stereo tracks, and then track number three is microphone one. So I also have a microphone plugged into the third input, which is going to be track five. So I'm just going to switch over and start recording in that. So now I'm speaking into microphone input number three, and you can see that the stereo, the first two tracks are still recording everything, but then track number five is going to be microphone number three. And that's it. So now, what you can do when you're editing is delete these two stereo tracks, because I don't need them, and now I can edit every single person's microphone track individually. And this process will work for any USB interface or mixer that supports multi-track recording. You just have to make sure that you figure out how many tracks you actually need Audacity to know to record, depending on your interface or mixer. All right, so now I'm going to show you how to bring in additional audio tracks into Audacity, because I have my intro segment here, and I want to now add the interview that's going to go with this episode. So all I have to do is drag and drop the file that I want included. So here I've got my interview file ready to rock and roll. All you have to do is click and drag it in, and then Audacity will create a new track for the interview. So let's go ahead and drag and drop in our theme music, and they're going to bring it right in and create a new track. So that's all you have to do. When you need to bring in different segments, different recordings, theme music into Audacity, you simply drag and drop it in. But now I want to show you how to actually edit things in Audacity, and there's three tools that you need to become familiar with. It's the selection tool, the time shift tool, and the envelope tool. Let me show you the selection tool first. So up here in the top left, you have these tools over here, and the one that I have selected right now is the selection tool. And the selection tool allows you to do a couple things. For one, you can highlight certain segments. So here I'm just clicking and dragging, and now I have this segment highlighted. If I wanted to, I could delete that segment, and it would totally remove it. You can also set the playback point. So from here, if I hit play, it would actually start at this point and keep moving forward. And when you delete segments, it actually shifts everything over from the right. So if I highlight this section, say I don't want that, I highlight it, I hit delete on my keyboard, it's going to automatically shift everything over to replace that, which is pretty cool. It's a very, very nifty tool there. Now let's say that I wanted to delete it, but then move this portion of the track over. So I use my selection tool, click where I want to cut it, and then I'm going to use Command-I or Control-I to create a split. So if I go to Command-I, it's going to split it. But then in order to move it, I need to use the time shift tool, and that's what allows you to move tracks around within Audacity. So if I go up here and click on this tool, it's two arrows right next to each other. If I click on that, now I have the time shift tool, and I'm just going to go over and highlight this section, and I'm going to grab it, and I'm going to drag it. See how that works? So now I can move this wherever I want to within this track using the time shift tool. Now before I talk about the third tool that you're going to be using, the Envelope tool, you'll notice down here this theme music is much louder than the audio segments. And so once I've shifted things around to exactly where I want them, let's say I want this to start here, I want this to be way over here, and I need this to be softer. Over here you can control the level for your audio. So I want to drop this down so it's not as loud as these other clips. So you can actually hear what people are saying up here in the intro while this music is playing in the background. So first you'll want to go through all of these tracks that you have imported, adjust the gain here, so that way when you listen through it, the volume is level and nothing is overpowering anything else. Now the Envelope tool is the third tool that I want to show you, and it's this guy right up here. And that's what's going to allow you to adjust the volume within each track. So let's say that for our theme music, for instance, I want it to start at this level and then taper off and get quieter as the interview starts. So you'll see these dark gray bars at the top and the bottom with the light gray in the middle. That's what you're going to be adjusting. So if I click here, it's going to create a keyframe or a data point. And then if I go over here, let's say this is where I want it to end, I'm going to create another one. Now I can drag this up and down and see how it adjusts the volume of the theme music. So you can make this as dramatic as you want to. Let's say I want to create another one over here, another data point, make it even quieter. And so you can adjust the volume of each of your audio tracks using the envelope tool, which is pretty cool. And you just shape this to your liking until it sounds exactly the way that you want it to. So now I want to talk to you about how to actually structure your episodes. It's really helpful to be able to find the different parts of your episode quickly and be able to edit them without affecting the other segments. So here you can see that I've structured it chronologically, which is the first way you can do it. So the beginning of the episode starts in the top left of my screen. And then the end of the episodes, the outro is in the bottom right. And it follows this kind of stair step pattern, right? And so here you just follow from the top left all the way through the episode to the bottom right. Now the other way that you can do this is to put each audio source on its own track. So let's say for instance that this outro narration was actually recorded up here in the intro. And so all I would do is take my time shift tool, make the cuts where I transition from the intro to the outro, move this over to the end. And now I have my narration portion, which is me speaking to the microphone, I've got my theme music, and then the actual interview that I conducted with my guest. And that's another way that you can organize your audio files to be able to edit every single segment, every single audio source independent of the others, and still maintain an organized workflow. Now when your episode is ready to export, all you have to do is go to file, export, export as wave. You can do export as mp3, there's an additional plugin that you need to download in order to do that on your computer. But I'm just going to go with export as wave, that's the file type that I prefer. And so you'll see here that you have the option of choosing where you're going to save it, I'm going to just save it to my desktop here because that'll be easiest. And then here you have all the different options, but I'm going to stick with wave 16 bits. Hit save, your tracks will be mixed down to two stereo channels in the exported file, that is fine, that's exactly what I want, right, that it's not just going to be one audio track, it's going to be all of these mixed into one audio file, so that's exactly what I want. And then it's going to ask me for this metadata that you don't really need if you use a podcast host because typically they will take care of the metadata for you, but if you do happen to need to put in the metadata and attach it to the file, this is where you would do that. You can simply hit okay, and it will start to export your wave file. And that's it. Now we have our final episode rendered out and ready to upload to our podcast host. Now once you have exported your final episode from Audacity, I recommend running it through another software called Alphonic. Now Alphonic will mix and master your final episode to give you that high quality audio that you're looking for. And I'll leave a link in the YouTube card here and in the description below this video so you can watch our complete tutorial on how to use Alphonic for your podcast. Now if you have a question about something I did or didn't talk about in this tutorial, just leave a comment below this video and I'll do my best to answer it. And if you're new to the whole podcasting thing, you're just getting your feet wet trying to get all your tools, your microphone, everything dialed in, make sure you subscribe to this YouTube channel. Every single week we put out new gear review videos, strategy videos, and software tutorials like this one. So if you want to hone your craft and become a better podcaster, make sure you're subscribed to this YouTube channel. Well that is it for today. Thank you for watching and as always, keep podcasting. Transcribed by https://otter.ai