#Audacity audio editor tutorials windows
Audacity uses Windows audio defaults for recording and playback with few exceptions, so go down to your system tray, right-click your volume control, and go to “Recording Devices”. Let’s get a track recorded to illustrate some basic editing. There’s a lot here, but we’ll go into more depth in future articles in this series.
Selection tools: Here, you can choose where to start selection by time, and then choose to put in an end time, or a length of selection.Audio tracks: The top of this area has the timeline, and any audio tracks will appear here.Shortcut bar: Shortcuts to quick actions – such as cut, paste, insert silence, etc – and for zooming.Level sliders: Change the volume level for both output and input, and the drop-down menu to the immediate right is to select an input.Clicking on the the input meter will actively monitor audio levels, and right clicking will give you options to change the refresh rate. Level meters: The left one is for output, and the right is for input.Toolbar: In order, from top-left to bottom-right: Selection, Envelope, Draw, Zoom, Time Shift, and Multi-Tool Mode.Audio controls: The standard controls – pause, play, stop, skip backward, skip forward, and record – for the project as a whole.There’s a lot of options in the main window, but it breaks down pretty simply. We’ll leave the extra add-ons for another day. If you use Linux, you can just grab it from your repository.
#Audacity audio editor tutorials download
Hop on over to the Audacity download page, and be sure to choose the 1.3 series, as that’s the most compatible with the latest OS releases. Audacity can help you understand simpler concepts of audio editing that can be transferred to those more powerful programs. Perhaps most importantly, though, while more advanced apps like Adobe’s Soundbooth or Apple’s GarageBand get the job done, they’re designed for more experienced users and for more involved projects. It’s got great plug-ins and amazing effects right out of the box. It’s cross-platform, so even though our guide is done in Windows, OS X and Linux users can play, too. It’s open source, and that’s always appreciated by geeks like us. In this series, we’ve chosen to highlight a particular application, Audacity, because of a few important reasons.