Tutorials
How to Import & Export in Audacity
In this tutorial, we’re going to look at importing and exporting with Audacity.
Before we start, there are two handy plugins we need:
LAME MP3 encoding software, which allows you to export mp3 files.
FFmpeg library which allows Audacity to import and export a much larger range of audio formats including M4A (AAC), AC3, AMR (narrowband), and WMA and also to import audio from some video files including MP4 and MOV.
It doesn’t appear to support AVI files at this time. If you have a video format that isn’t compatible you can convert it to MP4 easily by using this method:
This particular video shows how to convert M2TS (AVCHD) files for Camtasia, but the method shown will work for our purpose here for Audacity.
If you followed part 1 of the audacity tutorials, then you will have already installed these plugins.
If not, using the menu in Audacity, click ‘edit’ > ‘preferences’ and then you click on ‘Libraries’.
Here you can check if you have already installed them by clicking on the ‘Locate’ button, or you can download them by clicking on the ‘Download’ button.
This will take you to a page with the links you need. Select the link that applies to your operating system and this will take you to the relevant download page.
If you need any more help installing those, please go back to part one of my audacity tutorials.
Once we have the plugins installed, then we’re ready to do what we need to do.
To import audio, in the menu, go to File > Import > Audio.
Next, navigate to a .wav file on your computer. Select the file and click ‘Open’.
We get a message asking us if we want to make a copy before editing and I’ll select ‘Ok’.
I usually work with a copy, apply noise reduction, compression, equalization and then normalize the file.
Click here if you want to learn how to this.
I then export it with a suffix of ‘Edited’ added to the end of the file name. It can be exported as a ‘.wav’ file or we have the option of exporting it as a ‘.mp3’ now that we have the Lame MP3 installed.
When we export we get the option to put in some metadata some properties to the to the file if we want to.
If you haven’t installed the Lame MP3 you’ll get an error message prompting you to do.
Now let’s import a video file, so let’s imagine you’ve just taken some video footage from your camera or from your smartphone and you want to import the audio from that video file for editing.
We again from the menu, select File > Import > Audio.
Here we can select a MOV or MP4 file. If you have a file that is not supported (e.g. an AVI or MT2S file) check out how to fix it here.
If the files are from my iPad or iPhone the video files are MOV files.
The procedure is the same as before, we edit the audio as we see fit, and then we can export the file as a WAV or an MP3.