A beginners beginner guide.

Here is something I was putting together to introduce some new people to using Audacity, and thought the rest of the world might appreciate it too.

This is your opening screen.

Audacity Project

When You press the record button or drag and drop an audio file into your project area you will create your first track.

How to do important things in Audacity:

Audacity Playback Controls

Using the basic controls, play stop and navigation

-top left-hand corner.

These controls work like a tape deck.

1. Pause the audio cursor to be ready to play from that point

2.Play the audio project

3.Stops audio

4.full rewind -returns cursor to start of project.

5.full fast forward -sends cursor to end of project

6.Record button -pressing this button will instantly start recording audio from the built in microphone on your laptop onto a new track all by itself.

Audacity 1.3 Beta project

1. Zoom in and out -timestamps on top of the file.

You navigate each project.

2. Left-right navigates how long the project goes for, in seconds

this can be adjusted so you can ‘zoom in’ to smaller amounts of time.

For example… you want to delete all the space between sounds

3.Up and down follows each track used in the project.

4. Master volume = turns down the WHOLE file, if sounds are distorting too much

5. track volume =adjust the volume of EACH TRACK individually to balance with other tracks. e.g. turn down drums because they ‘drown out’ the other instruments

Audacity Solo & Mute buttons

solo = mutes every other track except those with this button selected. Allows you to isolate tracks of audio

mute = silences the tracks with this button pressed, Allows you to hide tracks, for example, turn off vocals and make a ‘karaoke’ version of a song.

Basic Manipulation of Audio:

Move file -not possible directly within this program, you must use a combination of ‘cut’ and ‘paste’

Audio selected within Audacity 1.3Beta

Cut -select the audio file from the track you wish to cut, then press these buttons. ctrl+alt+x

this will remove the section of audio you have selected to clipboard without moving other audio around on the track

paste -select which track and time you wish to paste the audio on then use. ctrl+v to paste the audio clip into the track.

If you wish to paste the track without moving other audio make sure you SELECT the track area to paste the audio file into… (insert picture of silence selected) Doing things this way will work similar to selecting text to REPLACE in a word document.

copy -select the audio file from the track you wish to copy,make sure you select the amount of time that you wish to copy to the clipboard, then use. ctrl+c

repeat -not possible directly within this program. You are limited to repeating the steps for ‘copy’ and ‘paste’