Audacity: What it is and how it works to edit audio

Audacity

A complete open source audio recording and editing software that works on all operating systems: Windows, Mac and Linux. Many creators around the world use it on a regular basis. I'm sure you've also heard of Audacity. What is it and how it works? We explain it to you in this article.

First released in May 2000, today Audacity is a highly valued tool for musicians, podcasters, and other communication professionals. Is multilingual and free platform it is constantly renewed with regular updates, improving its functionalities and possibilities every day.

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La audio editing is the process of selecting and combining different sounds with the aim of creating a sound document using different techniques and tools. The evolution of technology allows us to do this easily through a type of software known as a digital audio editor. And Audacity is one of the best.

What can we do with Audacity?

There are many things that Audacity allows us to do. Not for nothing is it one of the most powerful audio editors that can be found. Here is a small sample of its potential, everything we can do:

  • Perform recordings from different sound sources (microphone, external audio cards via USB, computer line input, etc).
  • Import and export audio in almost all formats that exist.
  • Record different audio channels simultaneously (multitrack function).
  • Edit and mix different sound tracks, as well as add effects.

Download and install Audacity

install audacity

Audacity is available for download, absolutely free, at this link. Also there we will find plugins and libraries to improve its functions. The download and installation is free and free. The only thing to pay attention to is choose the correct version for our operating system (Windows, Linux, Mac…) from the “Download” Menu. It is important to always opt for the latest version of the program, since it is updated quite frequently.

The file audacity_installer It will be saved on our computer. To activate it you have to double
Click on it or choose the “Run” option. Afterwards, you just have to follow the installation instructions, a really simple process, clicking on the “Next” and “OK” buttons, as appropriate.

How to use Audacity

La interface Audacity is much simpler and more intuitive than most audio editing programs. In other words, even if we're new to this world or it's the first time we've used this software, we're not going to have any problem adapting to how it's used.

audio interface

As shown in the image, at the top is the menu bar with all its options and below it the Control buttons: play, stop, forward... Along the same lines, we see a series of very useful tools for editing audio: zoom, level meter, mixes, etc.

The audio track graphic occupies the center of the screen, flanked on the top by the timeline indicator and on the left by the main track controls.

Recording

Before making a recording it is necessary set the quality level of the sample rate. By default, this level is predefined when installing Audacity, although there is the possibility of choosing it ourselves within a wide range that goes from 8.000 hz to 384.000 hz. The more hertz, the better the sound quality.

It will also be necessary to define the Sample Format. Options are: 16-bit, 24-bit, or 32-bit. Once these values ​​are adjusted, we save the configuration by pressing «OK».

microphone

If what we want is to record our voice (to make a podcast, for example), these are the steps to start a recording:

  1. First you have to connect microphone to your computer and check that Audacity has recognized it.
  2. Then we press the button "Engrave" and we start the recording.
  3. When we're done, we click "Stop".
  4. We check that everything has been registered with the option "Play", in which we will hear the result.

As you can see, these are very simple steps. However, this is just one raw recording, which we can repeat as many times as we want before moving on to the really important phase, which is editing.

Edition

Editing an audio file is a complex task, although with Audacity it can be done very easily. For this it is necessary select the track or track fragment on which we want to make changes, by clicking on it at the beginning of the fragment and, without releasing the button, dragging the cursor to the end.

Within the "Edit" menu we find the following options:

  • Undo (Ctrl+Z).
  • Redo (Ctrl+Y).
  • Remove audio or tags / Cut (Ctrl+ x).
  • Remove audio or tags / Delete (Ctrl+ k).
  • Audio mute.
  • Trim Audio.
  • Remove audio or tags / Split and Cut.
  • Delete audio or tags / Split and Delete.
  • Trim Boundaries / Split.
  • Trim Boundaries/Split and New.
  • Link.
  • Disunite in the silences.
  • Copy.
  • Paste.
  • Double.

multitrack options

multitrack audacity

Audacity gives us the possibility of working with several audio channels or layers at the same time. Thus, we can play all the audio tracks or layers at the same time, mute some of them, combine music and voice, adjust the volume of each track at any time, add effects, etc. Although there are many more, these are two of the most outstanding functions:

  • volume envelopes, to control the volume of each track individually, acting on different moments along the timeline.
  • Effects (echo, reverb, etc.), available in the menu of the same name.
  • Mixture, where there are different options to merge the different tracks and get a complete and finalized audio.

Save and export

With the work already finished, just save the audio using the path File> Save As. That yes, before it will be necessary export it so that it is compatible with the programs that we are going to use. Finally, we must freely choose the format that best suits us depending on what the destination of our audio will be (MP3, WMA, AIFF...).

Conclusion

Audacity is the best audio editing program for non-professional users. This program offers us everything we need to record and edit audio. Its functionalities are very numerous (here we have only mentioned the most important), the more we use the program, the better performance we will obtain from it. In short, Audacity is the best resource that we are going to have to create a podcast or edit all kinds of audio.


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