Editing recordings with Audacity

[Jon Hall]

I learned a lot from the replies to my previous thread "Recording Formats" and now I'm ready to take another big step. In addition to some band practices that I recorded as mp3 and 16 bit wave files, I recorded a friend's 45 minute live performance in a 16 bit wave file from the PA output. It sounds really good in it's raw state but I want to learn how to edit and enhance the recording. I've downloaded Audacity and have used it to import and export files but that is all I've done.

I don't have a clue to editing the file. I want to achieve the best sound I can with Audacity and divide the performance into separate tracks.

I would appreciate your suggestions and recommendations.

[Jim Hilburn]

I'm at about the same spot but I don't expect to be doing a lot of further editing like compression and such.
I recommend looking in Youtube. There is a lot of tutorials on the use of Audacity there. There's a lot to learn about many things on Youtube, like cooking and mixing drinks as well as guitar and mandolin playing. But it's very useful for working in Audacity.

[Andy Miller]

Jon, I've diced up longer performances into individual songs just by selecting the audio before the song and deleting it, then selecting the audio after the song and deleting it, then Save As and fine tune it from there. Then start over with the whole thing to do the same for the next song. There may be a more efficient way to do this for all I know.

Under the Effects menu you should have Fade In and Fade Out, those are useful for this kind of thing.

As for enhancements like EQ, compression, reverb, and about every other effect or signal processing you can imagine, you can download plug-ins that will add them to your Effects menu here:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/nyquistplugins

And you can probably google for Audacity Nyquist plug-ins and find other sources of them too.

Once you have the plugin(s) installed you select the audio you want to apply it to, select the plug-in you want to use, and try it out. I find the "undo" function very useful while doing this!

[Jon Hall]

Is it possible, using Audacity, to remove specific frequencies? A friend told me that a recording can sound more natural after removing some mid - frequencies.

[John Kasley]

You can attenuate different frequencies, or more accurately, a band of frequencies, but you can't remove them entirely. Best thing to do is make a copy of the recording you are working with and use that one for editing so that you always have an unedited original if you accidentally make changes you don't like or want to keep. Then experiment with the equalizer and/or other plug-ins to see what the effects are. Also, listen to the results on whatever device you intend to use for playback as this may require different equalization settings (i.e Ipod vs high end home entertainment system).

[Ole Joe Clark]

Get a note pad and pencil and have it handy.

To edit audio in Audacity, open the file and play it through and delete any chatter, dead space etc., and note the minute and seconds for the beginning and end of the tunes you want to seperate on your note pad, be sure to note which track you are working with. Go to the end of the first track, which is also the beginning of track 2, hit CONTROL-B and a little red window pops up below the track, place your cursor in the red box and click, then type your description in the box and hit enter. Do this for all the tracks you wish to export, then use SAVE AS wave files, multiple, chose your destination and then export.

If you get confused just keep trying, and be prepared to spend a lot of time because editing audio is a time consuming process.

[Coffeecup]

Is it possible, using Audacity, to remove specific frequencies? A friend told me that a recording can sound more natural after removing some mid - frequencies.

It might be possible using the noise reduction function. The first step of noise reduction is taking a sample of the noise, for example the "silent" section between tracks ripped from an LP. You might achieve something by being selective with the sampling and possibly repeating the process several times with different samples.
I'm not sure how how removing some mid-range makes it sound more natural though.

[steve V. johnson]

John K's point is excellent. Work on copies. Redundancy is your friend. Save early and often.

Enjoy,

stv