The How To tIpZz Basic Guide to Audio Editing.

Ever get the urge to edit some audio but you’re not sure where to start? Settle in with this HTG guide to the free audio editor Audacity that’s written for beginners but caters to geeks of all levels.

Note: this is the first article in a multi-part series that we’ll be covering over the next few weeks.

Oh, the Audacity!

In this series, we’ve chosen to highlight a particular application, Audacity, because of a few important reasons.  It’s free, which is always optimal.  It’s open source, and that’s always appreciated by geeks like us.  It’s cross-platform, so even though our guide is done in Windows, OS X and Linux users can play, too.  It’s got great plug-ins and amazing effects right out of the box.

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.  Audacity can help you understand simpler concepts of audio editing that can be transferred to those more powerful programs.

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.  If you use Linux, you can just grab it from your repository.  We’ll leave the extra add-ons for another day.

User Interface

There’s a lot of options in the main window, but it breaks down pretty simply.  Let’s take a look.

1. Audio controls: The standard controls – pause, play, stop, skip backward, skip forward, and record – for the project as a whole.
2. Toolbar: In order, from top-left to bottom-right: Selection, Envelope, Draw, Zoom, Time Shift, and Multi-Tool Mode.
3. Level meters: The left one is for output, and the right is for input.  Clicking on the the input meter will actively monitor audio levels, and right clicking will give you options to change the refresh rate.
4. 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.
5. Shortcut bar: Shortcuts to quick actions – such as cut, paste, insert silence, etc – and for zooming.
6. Audio tracks: The top of this area has the timeline, and any audio tracks will appear here.  More on that in a bit.
7. 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.

There’s a lot here, but we’ll go into more depth in future articles in this series.

Recording a Track

Let’s get a track recorded to illustrate some basic editing.  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”.

Make sure your microphone is set to be the default device.  Then, in Audacity, just click the “Record” button up top.  It’s the one that has a small red circle in the center.

You’ll see something like this appear:

Audio Tracks

Let’s take a closer look at the audio track and it’s associated stuff.

1. Timeline:  Here you can see the lengths of your audio tracks.
2. Audio Track Properties:  The pertinent audio properties can be found here and changed.  Tracks can also be removed by clicking on the tiny “X” in the upper-right corner.  Volume and balance can be adjusted by moving the sliders.
3. Scrubber:  This green arrow usually has a line running down the screen as well.  It appears when you hit “Play” and marks the location of the waveform that is currently output through your speakers.
4. Left Channel Audio Waveform
5. Right Channel Audio Waveform

As you can see, there’s a wealth of information displayed here.  Any added tracks will stack vertically in this portion of the screen so you can see the information from all of them.

Saving Your Project

When you’ve made some edits but you’re not quite done with your project, you can save it for later.  Go to File > Save Project As…

You’ll see a warning pop up, reminding you that this just for use with Audacity itself.  Following that, you’ll get a normal save prompt.  That’s it!

Exporting Audio

If you want to get your audio track, with all of its layers and effects, into a single finished file, you’re going to want to export it.  Go to File > Export…

You’ll see a different save dialog pop up.

After giving it a name, you can change the type of audio file you’d like to encode it as.  There are more than a few options.

After you choose your type, you can click on the “Options…” button to change things like the bitrate.  I left mine as a “WAV” file for now.  You may need additional codecs to be able to use other options, but that’s something we’ll cover in a future article.

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As you can see, we’re just touching on the basics of using Audacity, but rest assured, we’ve got some interesting articles coming up soon.  We’ll cover the tools you’ll use, filters, effects, and even some extra fun stuff, so stay tuned!

The How To TIpZz Guide to Audio Editing: Cutting, Trimming & Arranging.

Audacity novices often start with lofty project ideas, but sometimes they lack the basics. Knowing how to cut and trim tracks is basic audio editing and is a fundamental starting point for making more elaborate arrangements.

For this exercise, I’ll be making a ringtone from a Castlevania: Symphony of the Night track. I have the original CD and used that so I started with better quality audio than an MP3. You can follow along with any file you like, just so you get a feel for cutting, trimming, and arranging sound clips for yourself.

I know which parts I want to edit in the track, but a quick play-through will help me look for those areas visually.

The scrubber in the above screenshot is pointing to a lull in the music, where the audio drops low or fades out. These areas are ideal spots to work with.

First, let’s make sure the Selection tool is active.

Next, let’s make a selection in an area of the track where we want to make an edit. Click and drag your mouse, and you’ll see that the background changes to a darker shade of gray.

I know that the song changes somewhere in here. You can hit CTRL+1 to Zoom In, or click on the icon that’s a magnifying glass with a plus. This will help us identify more precisely where to end our selection.

That’s much better, isn’t it? You can see that on the right side of the selection area, there’s a spike in amplitude. That’s where I want my selection to end, but it’s not properly aligned. If you move your mouse close to that area, you’ll see the cursor change to a hand that’s pointing.

Clicking and dragging while this cursor is shown will allow you to change that particular selection boundary. You can see mine is much better now.

Repeat the same process with the left boundary. You can see my selection encompasses a quiet beginning point and a quiet ending point, which makes it sound clean and natural.

What I want to do is cut this section and move it to another area. I can just click the Cut button or hit CTRL+X.

You can see that the rest of the track after my selection got pushed up to where the selection started.

While it’s possible to paste that clip in the same track at a different point, it’s much easier to make arrangements using multiple tracks. Go to Tracks > Add New > Stereo Track.

Using different tracks can help keep things straight, so you can think of it like using Layers in an image editor. Sometimes, it’s more work to use multiple tracks, and sometimes it’s a necessity, but it’s process you should familiarize yourself with if you plan to do audio editing.

Two tracks ending up being too tall for good screenshots, so I clicked on the bottom of each track area and dragged up to resize them vertically. This has no effect on the audio, it just makes it easier to see things.

And now, click where you want to paste the clip in the second track and click on the Paste button or hit CTRL+V.

Note that the bottom track has an active selection. The dark background is not in the top track at all, despite being visible in the timeline. Now, I want to change its linear placement, or in other words, move it in time. To do that, we use the Time Shift Tool.

Now you can click and drag anywhere in your selection and the whole thing will slide side-to-side. You can also have it snap to other locations, like the beginning or end.

Alright, I have it where I want it in relation to another section of the track. When you hit play, however, Audacity will play both tracks over each other. This works well for mixing different tracks, but not here. Let’s insert some silence in the first track. Click on the selection tool and highlight the portion of the first track that’s directly above the second. You’ll see that you can snap to that area.

Next, click on the Insert Silence tool, located next to the Undo button.

This converts our selection to silence. Instead of cutting and having the latter part of the track jump forward, this will keep it as-is because the silence acts as a placeholder.  Next, I decided to cut some of the audio after the pasted clip.

Finally, the portions of the track I wanted to align are properly done.

But wait, I only want the middle sections of this track! Instead of cutting out areas of the track before and after, we can use the trim tool to make this easier. Use the selection tool to highlight what you want to keep.

Adjust your start and end points, but be sure to drag your mouse down into the second track while making your selection. Notice how the dark gray background appears on both tracks in the above screenshot. When you’re ready, click on the Trim Tool, which is right next to the Paste button.

You can see that the Trim Tool acts just like a Crop Tool does in image editors. The Trim Tool leaves the audio where it is, but that’s not particularly useful in our case. Use the Time Shift Tool to move this so it aligns with 0 on the timeline. All done!

Since this is a ringtone for me, I went to File > Export and saved it as an MP3.

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If you chose not to follow along, here are a few important points to take away from this procedure:

• Your audio selections can be changed by dragging from as close to the original boundary as possible.
• The Cut Tool removes sections from the timeline, leaving no gap.
• The Insert Silence Tool removes audio but leaves a gap.
• Pasting clips inserts them where ever the scrubber is, i.e. where you clicked last.
• The Trim Tool acts as a Crop Tool, leaving the audio where it is in the timeline.
• You can add multiple tracks and use them like layers to better arrange your audio piece.

Hopefully this exercise will give you a feel for the really basic edits you can make to tracks. They’re the foundation of all of the more advanced stuff you’ll be doing, so executing them quickly and efficiently will save loads of time later on.