The Audacity Files

David Shamah, The Jerusalem Post August 3, 2005

By now, you've got your iMic and you're salivating to hear Bruce in crystal clear full MP3 stereo sound (hey, I know who my reader demographic is!). Maybe you've even made basic recordings with Audacity, just to try it out.

Audacity has a bit of a learning curve, but it's worth learning, because it really is well suited to recording from analog sources. That's not to say that other programs are available for this kind of project as well; with a little work, you could get GarageBand, which comes with the Mac's iLife suite, to so similar work. But with Audacity, most of the basic work you need to do to transform your tapes and records into MP3s is right on the main screen.

So, here goes my very basic tutorial on using Audacity to move your music into the modern, digital era. As mentioned last time, you just hook up your line-out tape or record player to your computer and start recording. Audacity's recording button looks just like the one on your tape recorder, and you just click it on or off to record.

Once you're done, you'll "see" your music in Audacity's waveform display window, which contains the squiggly lines that represents the digital audio bits of your music. You can highlight any portion and use the program's Edit menu or toolbar tools to copy, cut, or paste any part of the audio you want to save. The idea is you use the Edit tools to hone your music into the "shape" - i.e. sound - of what you want it to sound like.

Like any other computer program, Audacity will only do what you tell it to do - so unless you turn off the recording function and save the file after each song, the whole tape or album side you've recorded will appear in a single waveform display window, meaning that as far as Audacity is concerned, it's a single unit. So, one basic editing technique you'd probably want to apply is separating music into separate tracks, a task Audacity can easily accomplish.

Editing, as any newspaper geek will tell you, entails rolling up your sleeves and moving things thither and about in order to come up with a finished product, and editing in Audacity works the same way. You can eliminate the "natural" hiss between tracks as recorded off a recorded player by highlighting the empty area and selecting silence from the edit menu. How do you know where the space between tracks is? Easy - just look for the even, low spots in the waveform display, which indicates that there is almost no "noise" at that point in the recording. If you're not sure, you can highlight the "edge" of the spikes in the waveform window and click on play to define the specific point where the silence should be superimposed.

The most efficient way to work with Audacity is to record a bunch of stuff - like both sides of a 90 minute tape (a double album) or as much as your tape or record player allows you to play in one shot. Stop the recording when its done and start working on spacing the tracks. Then you can separate the tracks into separate files. Why bother? If you plan on converting these songs into MP3s, you'll want them as separate files so you can tag them with the correct name, artist and album. There are several ways to separate tracks; one is to highlight the section of the waveform window you want to separate and click on edit > duplicate. You will then get a second waveform window with just the data you've selected, which you can then export as a wav or MP3 (you can only have one duplicate window at a time, though). How will you know where the track begins and ends? Easy; the silences you've inserted between the files will show up as blank spaces in the original waveform window; just highlight the areas that have waveforms, duplicate, and save or export.

Exporting a file as an MP3 should be your last step, and if you want to listen to your music au naturel, go right ahead and export. But why not have some fun? Audacity lets you add all sorts of effects, making the bass bassier and the treble - well, you get the idea! The effects menu, which is activated when you highlight waveform data, includes allowing you to change speed, pitch, tempo, creating an echo, or adding "wahwah," among others.

The effect you'll most likely be interested in for the purpose of tape or record recording is the one for noise removal, which can reduce the amount of hiss that legacy recordings come with. Use the noise removal tool before you edit the file down into separate files by removing the waveforms between tracks as described above. To get rid of noise, highlight a section of the record that is silent except for the noise. Click on Get Noise Profile and play with the noise level, using preview to see how much hiss has disappeared. Noise removal works best with music, as opposed to talk.

Once you've done your editing, you can save your file as a WAV or export it as an MP3 (assuming you've downloaded the Lame MP3 encoder). All you need to do now is label your track; just go to the project menu and click on Edit MP3 tags, which will open a dialog box for you to type in the name of the track, artist, album, etc. Unfortunately, because this is a newborn digital file, there's no way to tag it other than manually, and I actually found the typing in of information to be the most tedious aspect of the conversion process.

Audacity has lots of other functions, with many of them suitable for full fledged music production, including overlaying sounds, voices, enhancing instruments, etc.. However, for our purpose of recording and converting, the above functions will do quite well. Next time we'll look at some other ways to work with and convert music.

ds@newzgeek.com

Audacity does much more than plain, simple recording, as you have probably figured out by now - and much of its abilities are due to its wide set of VST(Virtual Studio Technology) plugins, which are industry standard for use with synthesized and computer generated music. We looked at the noise removal

plugin in some detail, but if you want to enhance your music, there are other plugins available.

Amplify, for example, increases or decreases the volume of a track . When you open the dialog, Audacity automatically calculates the maximum amount you could amplify the selected audio without it being too loud.

There are lots of ways to skin a cat, as the saying goes - and lots of ways to move music off tapes and records and into digital format, other than Audacity, which we covered last time. For example, if you own the Nero Suite - used for recording CDs - you can use Nero's various options to record files to a WAV CD format (which you can then convert to MP3 format).