Audacity Tutorial 4: Make some noise (or not)!
In this Audacity Tutorial I have tried to tackle a couple of the main tasks folks want to deal with when they have audio of their own voice or an interview.
Firstly, how to make the audio louder or softer. Especially in interviews, you will often find one person is louder than the other. There is a very simple way to boost or quieten audio using Audacity.
Secondly, recordings of just voices sometimes have obvious background noise and various clicks and pops that you never noticed while recording. There are two features in Audacity that can help you screen out some of these noises.
My only suggestion with these tools is that you don’t over-use them, or have the settings too high. They can make the audio sound tinny, and I would personally prefer to hear a recording that has some depth (even if there is a bit of background noise) than a recording that sounds soulless. But it is very much a matter of personal preference and it is worth playing around with the settings until you like what you hear.
In the next Audacity tutorial I will show you how to bring in another track, which is useful if you want to mix some music with your voice track.
Oct 23rd, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Hi Lisa,
Great video – very comprehensive and informative.
Thanks!
Oct 23rd, 2008 at 10:33 pm
Hi Lisa,
Once again, great tutorial, learning heaps.
Looking forward to the next one
Thanking you
Cheers
Carme
Dec 1st, 2008 at 5:05 am
Really great series on audacity. I’ve had it for a year or so and only recently started to dabble with it as I have long wanted to get into voice work and could never afford the expensive software. Nor did I know the first thing about sound editing. So, even though I’ve tinkered with audacity – I’ve often wondered what all the tools were and how they worked – NOISE is my number ONE problem. Because I don’t have a filter or proper mic (using computer speakers) I get tons of noise in the b/g whenever I record anything. And these tutorials so far have shown me what I can do to combat that. THANKS!
The noise remover tool is really great, but it does leave one sounding quite computer generated – like one of those robo voices you hear on telephone prompts. I need to work out how to get the voice normal after the noise has been taken away. But kudos to you for this!! I really liked learning about the silencer and click removal. Now on to the rest of the tutorials.
Note: I do wish you’d do some more tutorials and let us actually hear what happens to your voice when you play around with the settings so we can hear if we’re getting things relatively right. It just is kinda weird to have an audio tutorial w/o the corresponding audio as samples. Otherwise – good stuff!