How to use Audacity

This tutorial will show you how to record audio with Audacity using your microphone. You will learn how to do some basic editing, including noise reduction, compression, equalization and normalization.

Settings In The Audacity Project Window

To begin, we’re going to take a look at the settings to make sure that everything is set-up correctly.

If we look at the top right of the Audacity interface, there are three drop-down boxes, as shown in the image below.

The first box is where we can choose which microphone to use.
It’s automatically detected my USB microphone, the built-in microphone of my Logitech C920 HD Pro Webcam.

PLEASE NOTE: If you have trouble locating your equipment from the drop-down boxes, you can configure them in your system settings.

Click here to learn how to configure your system settings.

The second box is where we can select to record in stereo or mono, it doesn’t matter which of them you choose because most microphones record in mono and the track will pan out to stereo anyway when produced by Audacity. This can be left at the default.

The third box is where the playback device is selected. The usual options here are computer speakers or a USB headset.

In this case, my computer speakers are selected, and that’s fine for me, as I usually just plug in my headphones into the speaker jack on my computer anyway.

Above these boxes are the recording and playback volume sliders, you can leave these at the default.

The playback volume is simple enough, this is just how loud you want the sound to be when listening back to your recording.

With the recording volume, more care needs to be taken. It’s advisable to do a quick sound check with a sample recording and then you can adjust the recording level accordingly.

Audacity has a meter showing the recording level. It needs to be at as loud as possible, without going into the red, see the example below. This is too loud and will distort (sometimes known as ‘clip’).

 

Preferences

Defaults can be set in Audacity. Go to the Edit menu, and select Preferences.

From here many things can be configured, as shown in the image below.
If the Audacity interface you are using doesn’t look the same as the images shown here, this can be changed in the interface section of the preferences.

 

Transport Toolbar

This section is called the Transport Toolbar, it looks like most media players and should be familiar to most people.

It has buttons for controlling playback, recording and for moving to the start or end of a project. Each button can also be controlled with keyboard shortcuts.

Hovering over each button with the mouse will prompt a pop-up a short description of what it does.

 

 

 

Recording Audio

To record click the red button and wait a few seconds before speaking, this is so that a good sample of any background noise can be taken. Start speaking.
To end the recording click the yellow button.

The recorded audio can be seen in the timeline as a waveform as shown below.

Click anywhere on the timeline and click the green play button, and it will playback from that point.

Clicking on the arrow next to where it says audio track and selecting waveform (dB) shows much more clearly what’s going on with the audio waveform.

It is clear to see that straight line at the beginning of the recording now is not straight at all, the waveform is showing that noise has been picked up.
If we listen to this part of the recording we can hear the background noise, this is even more noticeable when wearing headphones/earphones.

Effects

Noise Reduction

To perform noise reduction, begin by selecting a small area on an ambient section of the timeline (no irregular sounds, music or speaking).

On the menu, click on  
Effect>Noise Reduction

Next, click on the Get Noise Profile button

On the menu, click on  
Select>All

This will select the whole track.

On the menu, click on  
Effect>Noise Reduction

This time click on the OK button.

The background noise has now been significantly reduced, it can be seen visually by the shape of the waveform, and of course can be heard when played back on the timeline – especially when listening through headphones.

Deleting Unwanted Audio

Sometimes, often, in fact, there are sections of the audio we would like to delete, a bang or doorbell sound in the background, perhaps a cough or error has been made.

The unwanted audio should be selected (left-click on the timeline and drag to make the selection). Then simply remove it by hitting the delete key.
The space at the beginning and the end of the track can be trimmed the same way.

Compression

The ‘Compressor’ effect reduces the dynamic range of audio. This allows the audio to be amplified further (without clipping).

To apply compression, select the whole track again.

On the menu, click on  
Effect>Compressor

For now, leave the settings at the default, if you wish to learn more about compression, you can find out more on the Audacity Manual Compressor Page.

Click OK.

Equalization

Equalization is used to manipulate sounds by frequency, allowing the volume of some frequencies to be increased, and some to be decreased.

To apply equalization, leave the track selected.

On the menu, click on  
Effect>Equalization

The preset curves I used to use were the treble boost and bass boost, select them from the Select Curve drop-down box as shown below.

I realized that for my voice, I didn’t need so much treble boost, so I created my own curve, that does bass and treble at the same time, shown below.

Normalize

Finally the Normalize effect is applied. This sets the peak amplitude of the track.  It can also be used to set multiple tracks to have the same peak amplitude, and it can equalize the balance of left and right channels of stereo tracks.

On the menu, click on  
Effect>Normalize

Click OK

 

To Conclude…

Have a listen to how the track now sounds. There should be a big improvement.

That concludes a basic, quick recording and editing procedure in Audacity:

 – Record a short vocal track
 – Noise reduction to remove the background noise
 – Compression to even out the sound
 – Equalization to boost the bass and treble
 – Normalization to set the peak amplitude

Default settings have been applied for the most part, and to learn more about all of the settings in Audacity, head over to the Audacity online manual.

How To Set A Default Microphone in Computer System Settings

This video shows how to enable/disable a webcam or microphone, and also how to set them as default in your system settings.
Although it was created with Facebook Live broadcasts in mind, it is relevant for other programs that use external equipment (like Audacity).