I recently attended an ITS training course to learn about Audacity, and how to prepare podcasts. Audacity is a free digital audio editing application, which runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. Here are some of the ways I can prepare my podcasts in Audacity:
Opening a recorded lecture in Audacity
Importing various audio file types (WAV, AIFF, MP3, Ogg Vorbis) is easy. Once a file is imported you are able to see the sound waves and start editing. Below I have imported an MP3 recording of a lecture.
A recorded lecture in its raw form
Now that I have my lecture imported, I have decided to add some backing music to make the content more palatable. This is as easy as adding a new track and importing another audio file. This doesn’t have to be used only for backing music – you might have an introduction file that you put on every podcast you create.
Two tracks in Audacity - recorded lecture and music clip
Once I had my backing track in place, I realised that it was much louder than the lecture track. To fix this I could have turned the volume of the individual track down, but instead I used the equalisation tool. This equalises the volume of all the tracks.
Tracks equalised in Audactiy
As with most live lectures this lecture has a few annoying coughs in the background. These are remarkably easy to remove if you can pin them down. The image below shows once such cough, before and after silencing.
A cough highlighted in a recorded lecture
A silenced cough in Audacity
This is a taste of what I learned during the course. If you want to be able to edit your podcasts, I recommend you attend the ITS Audacity training course.
