From a visual perspective, the track can be manipulated to make room for other tracks or to increase the focus on a specific track. Other useful track controls are Mute and Solo which silence the track (or all the audio on the track), or make the track the only thing that sounds. The pan control is conveniently labeled with L and R (i.e. Another fairly simple attribute is the pan of the track, which controls the left and right balance of the track. Volume will control the output level of every piece of audio on the entire track. Perhaps the most obvious track control is volume, denoted by the fader labeled + and. The image of a track below can be used as reference.Įach track has several options associated with the track as a whole, that is, changes to the options effect every piece of audio confined to the track (if this doesn’t make sense now, keep reading, things will clear up after we start bringing audio into Audacity). For convenience, Audacity will take care of the creation of tracks for you, whenever you import or record audio. You can create a track manually by selecting Tracks > Add New > Audio Track to manually insert a track. In Audacity audio is confined to a track. For now, it is blank because no audio has been tracked. The large grey area directly below the toolbar will be the location of your recorded or imported audio. Included in the toolbar by default are options for input and output settings, playback and record settings, and editing tools. This toolbar will be the primary interface for our interaction with the software. Notice the menu options at the very top of the screen, these will be useful later in this tutorial, but for now, focus on the toolbar that extends across the screen, just above the large grey area. At this point, you should see something similar to the following. After clicking OK you will be presented with the main screen. Feel free to click on any of these links for an even more in depth exploration of the capabilities of the program. Once you install and launch the program, you should be greeted with an initial message providing you with more information. Please bear in mind that the following images may appear different to you depending on your operating system and the version of Audacity you have installed.

Audacity can be downloaded from the official website. Its flexibility and price tag makes it a preferred audio editor to many.

Saving Your Project and Exporting AudioĪudacity is a multi-platform free open source audio recorder and editor useful in many different applications.

Dynamically Automating the Volume of the Audio.

Making Selections and Deleting Unwanted Audio.

UW Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)Īudacity Online Curriculum Introduction to Audacity.

Audacity reset to default