Audacity Tutorial

Description:

Audacity is a free and open-source digital audio editor and recording application
software, available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems.

How to download:

1. Visit https://www.audacityteam.org/ and click on the “Download Audacity”

button, and follow the instructions to download:

2. Select your operating system (Win, Mac, GNU/Linux), and this will take you to the
next page, select the file called “Audacity 2.4.2 zip file”.
3. Select the item you wish to download from their cloud, should be the first
recommendation:

4. Run audacity-win-2.4.2.exe in your computer and follow the default installation

recommendations.

Opening and editing audio files:

1. Run the program, it should look like this:

 2. To start working on a project click on “File” and “Open”:

3. Search in computer files for the audio you wish to work on and open it, it should
look like this:

Now Audacity will display, the length of our file, the peaks of “noise” in decibels (d.b),
note that the silent parts are just a straight horizontal line.
4. Press “Ctrl + A” to select all the audio sections and start working, you will observe
your gray background turned white, that means that your selection was
successful.
*You may also choose to select certain sections of your audio file, but we will talk
about that further ahead.

Exercise: Try playing a specific section of the audio, by clicking on the “minutes
bar” above the gray area. This will help you to compare the improvements in
audio later.

5. First, we recommend starting by normalizing your audio volume, this helps you
to remove the loudness of voice and high pitches, so the audio track has an even
and normal volume.

a. Press Ctrl + A to select all your audio track, then click on the “Effect”
button
 b. Choose, Normalize:

c. Use the default recommendation setting of -3.00 dB:

*With further experience you may want to either lower or increase that.

You will notice that the sound waves in your audio track have become thinner,
you have reduced the loudness of the files and normalized it.

Exercise: Try clicking on the same section you clicked before and listen to the
changes in your audio track. It’s possible that in some parts of the track, or in all
of it, the changes won’t be perceivable. But Normalize, is necessary for the
stability of the next modifications.
6. Noise Reduction

The noise reduction will help us to mitigate (not to eliminate) the background
noise generated by static, crowds, or ambient noise.

a. Observe your track to identify where the participants do not talk, you
should click on the minute bar above the track, to verify that the
participants are not talking.

b. To be able to work on the noise reduction, you will need to Zoom In. First,
hover your mouse over the desired location and press Ctrl + Scroll
up/down. You will see how your track extends like this:
Before After
 c. Once you have found the appropriate length, click on the white
background, and drag your mouse over the length of that line:

Now, your modification will only

apply to the selected field.
Go to the Effects tab
and search for Noise reduction.

d. In Noise reduction, click on the “Get a Noise Profile” and then go back to
your audio file and press Ctrl + A and Effects again, click on “Repeat Noise
reduction” just on the top and you will notice your track has slimmed
down, you have successfully reduced the background noise.

You will come across some instances on which the participants murmured, and
this was lost due to your sound reduction. You may press Ctrl + Z to delete your
previous entry or press Ctrl + Y to restore it if you wish to keep it.
7. The “Compressor” effect
If you ever found a track on which one of the people talking was too loud and the
other one was barely audible, the compressor effect will help us to even down/up
the sound waves in our track.

a. Repeat your selection as when you did the Normalize effect, either for a
piece of the track or all of it and search for the Compressor effect:

b. The default settings are very good, but we recommend change them to this
configuration:

Threshold -30dB

Noise Floor -50dB

Ratio 2:1 or 5:1

Attack/Release Defaults
Time
 Thank you for your attention

We would like to thank our translators for

reading this short training, we’ve covered
the most basic and essential tools from this
app but we encourage each and all of you to
look further technics and methods to
improve your use of it.