This post covers my first attempts at editing audio using Audacity. This is another project that follows a lesson from the programming historian and aims to produce a very short podcast. 

After installing Audacity, I imported in a track of music, which will become the intro music to the mini-podcast. The program displays this music track as waveforms representing amplitude over time. Zoomed in enough, it does take the form of a wave, though it doesn’t look like one otherwise. There are two waveforms, because it was recording in stereo.

The other track to include was as yet unrecorded, so I then used audacity to record my own voice, saying the simple line:

“This podcast is the product of doing this project learning to edit and record audio using Audacity.” 

To prevent Audacity from rerecording the music track, I muted that track while doing the recording. I also had to add a new track.

Once I ended the recording, the waveform of that was added right at the beginning, starting at the same time as the music. However, there were a couple things to do to clean up the new track before worrying about its placement. First was to get rid of extraneous silence simply by clicking and dragging to select the silences, made visible as a straight line, and pressing the delete key. 

The other item is in the category of transitions, as I added a fade in effect. I zoomed in on the recording to see the effect take place, I highlighting just the beginning of the wave, I selected “fade in” from the effect menu.

I then did the same process at the end of the recording, but selecting “fade out.”

To move the recording to a more appropriate timestamp, a few seconds in, I dragged the waveform horizontally over to where I wanted it in relation to the music track. 

Next was to get rid of the rest of the music, which again was a matter of highlighting the unwanted portion and pressing delete.

To produce a crossfade, once the two tracks where aligned suitably, both tracks were highlighted and “crossfade tracks” was selected in the effect menu.

Finally I exported the audio as an MP3 and inserted it here, at the end of this post.