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hpr1404 :: Editing pre-recorded audio in Audacity

Ken demonstrates how to edit an audio file with Audacity

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Hosted by Ken Fallon on Thursday, 2013-12-19 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
audacity, audio, edit. 2.
The show is available on the Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/hpr1404

Listen in ogg, spx, or mp3 format. Play now:

Duration: 00:24:25

general.

In today's show I walk you through the very basics of "editing" a audio track that has been recorded outside Audacity. Audacity can be found at https://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Overview of Audacity

Audacity is a free, easy-to-use and multilingual audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems..

Editing the audio

The steps in this video include.

  • File > Import > Your file
  • Tracks > Stereo Track to Mono
  • Effect > Amplify (Accept defaults)
  • Delete audio: Highlight (click and drag) press Delete
  • Undo: Ctrl + Z
  • Intro Clip
  • Outro Clip
  • Move Track: (F6 Multitool) Ctrl - Click and drag
  • Export the Track:
    • Confirm that the Project Rate is set to 44100 Hz (bottom left)
    • File -> Export and select FLAC File
    • Click Options... to reveal FLAC Export Setup
    • Set Level to 8 (best)
    • Set Bit depth to 24
    • Artist Name: Your name
    • Track Title: Your show title
    • Album Title: Hacker Public Radio
      Audacity Export Settings

When you are ready you can contact admin@hackerpublicradio.org to get access to the FTP server. For more technical information see the README file and the Sample Show notes file.

hpr1404.webm
hpr1404.mp4

Comments

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Comment #1 posted on 2014-01-03 21:06:55 by George

All these years....

...and I didn't know about the multitool. I've needed that forever!

I am curious, why 24-bit flac? HPR shows being (mostly) mono, voice recordings don't typically need that kind of encoding. I know that you are going to convert to ogg, mp3, speex and possibly opus, but still a 16-bit input file should be more than adequate in 99.999 percent of the cases. Only when music is involved might it be necessary to use 24-bit, but even then, unless the source is recorded @ 24-bit it's really un-necessary.

Also, I was surprised there was no effort made to do noise removal, or level the tracks. I frequently notice level differences between the intro/outro and main recordings, levelling could go a long way to helping with that.

Comment #2 posted on 2014-01-05 20:43:40 by Ken Fallon

Because....

Because for Archive.org will get the flac and they can then encode it from the best possible encoding available to us, to whatever new format comes along.

Feel free to take a look at the encoding script and modify it as you desire.
git@gitorious.org:hpr-scheduling-system/hpr-scheduling-system.git

/transcoding/hprtranscode

Ken.

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