Hi everyone, Kevin here. Today I want to show you how you can use Audacity. With Audacity, you can both record and edit audio. It’s free, it’s open source, and it works on all major platforms including Windows, Mac and Linux. If you want to jump around this video, I’ve included timestamps down below. To help you understand how Audacity works, I’m going to be pulling together a radio commercial for the Kevin Cookie Company. I’ll record it and then I’ll also go through and edit. You can follow along if you’d like. My goal is by the end of this video, you’ll have comprehensive knowledge of how you can both record and also edit using Audacity. All right, let’s jump on the PC and let’s start out with how you can even get Audacity. To download Audacity, head to the website audacityteam.org. I’ve also included a link in the description down below. You can just click on that. Once you land on the homepage, you’ll see a prominent button for download Audacity. Click on that. This will drop you on the download page. It’ll automatically determine what operating system you’re on, and here it’ll kick off a download of the EXE. Once it finishes downloading, click on the EXE and run through the install process. Once you finish downloading and installing Audacity, launch the application. That’ll drop you into a brand-new project and you’ll see a screen that looks like this. We have a whole bunch of different menus across the top. We also have all of these different buttons and throughout this tutorial we’ll dig into what you can do with some of these. Before we start recording some audio or before we even import some audio into Audacity, first we need to configure a few settings for the project. Down in the bottom left-hand corner, you’ll see an option called project rate. This is also referred to as the sample rate. When you record audio, you’re not really capturing the entire audio wave. Instead, you’re just capturing samples of that wave. So, what do I mean by that? Well, it’s the same idea when you have a video camera. Let’s say you’re filming some action. Typically, you’ll film it, let’s say 24 frames per second, or maybe 30 frames per second. When you take all of those different frames, they’re all just still images, and you combine all of them together, that creates the illusion of motion, and with sound, it’s the exact same concept. We’re just taking little samples of the sound. The sample rate is basically the same thing as frames, but we call it sample rate for sound. Now, the more frames you have in video, the more accurate it is, and the same holds for sound. The higher your sample rate, the more accurate the sound will be. You took more samples, and it more closely represents what that sound wave looks like. However, as you go higher up, the file size will also become larger, and also, most people ears can’t really hear the difference. That’s why when you buy, let’s say, a typical music CD, the sample rate will be 44,100, and so that’s considered very good quality. And when you go higher than that, you just can’t really hear the difference. Usually when you select the sample rate for your project, you’ll go anywhere between 44,100 all the way up to 96,000, and that’ll give you very good quality. For today, I’m going to go with 48,000 as the project rate or my sample rate. Now that we’ve set the project rate, let’s shift our focus up into the top left-hand corner, and right up here we have this dropdown list. This contains all of the different audio drivers that you can use to record sound. You have one that’s called MME. This is the oldest of the bunch. It’s been around since Windows 3.1. This also has the greatest level of compatibility. Then you have a more recent one called Windows Direct Sound and then you have the most recent and newest one called Windows WASAPI. This one also tends to have the lowest level of latency. For now, I’m just going to leave it to the default one set to MME. To the right of that, you can select your microphone that you want to use in Audacity to record. When I click on this, you can choose from many different microphones. If you have more microphones on your computer, you might have a built-in microphone, you might also have an external microphone. Go through this list and select the microphone that you want to use. To the right of the microphone, you can also select whether you want to record in mono or stereo. Most microphones are simply mono, so you’ll want to go with this option. However, with stereo you get both a left channel and a right channel, so maybe you have an instrument, or something hooked up to your computer that has multiple channels. You can then record in stereo. For this, I’m just using a standard microphone, so I’ll leave it set to mono. And to the right of this, we have the last dropdown, and this is the playback device. Once we record some audio, what do you want to playback the audio from? For example, you might have speakers hooked up to your computer. Here I have a monitor that also has speakers, so I could select what device I want to use to playback the sound. I’m going to leave it set to my speakers. Now that we have our microphone and our speaker configured, next we want to make sure that the microphone levels are set appropriately. If we look right up here near the top, you’ll see this recording level and we have all these different numbers. When I click on here, it’ll start monitoring my microphone, so here I can see my input volume or levels. Now you might be wondering, well, what’s good and what’s considered bad. Right now, as I’m speaking, you’ll see this little blue line was placed here, so this was the highest volume level that it captured. Now I don’t want to go right up to the right of this zero. When that happens, my sound gets clipped off and then you lose some of the detail of that wave. You don’t want that to happen, so in general you want to stay right down here in this range. Now if you notice that maybe you’re too low over on the left, or maybe you’re too far over on the right and it’s going into the red, you can come over here and you can adjust your recording volume, and here if I move it all the way over to the right, here it comes back into this range. Now the microphone that I’m using today also has its own level adjustment and so that’s why it’s not spiking over here on the right-hand side. However, if you notice it’s spiking, either adjust your microphone or adjust this over here to make sure you’re not hitting all the way over on the right-hand side. With the levels right here, I can click on this and I can pull it out, so I could place these different items from the interface wherever I want, and right now you see that this meter is in a horizontal format. Here I can click in the bottom right-hand corner, and here I could adjust it so it’s in a vertical format and then I can place this wherever I want. So, depending on how you want to visualize your interface, you can adjust and configure this to look exactly how you want it to. Now I prefer to just leave it in the original state so I can go up here to view on the top menu. I’ll go down to toolbars and let me reset it to the original state. So here you’ll see that my monitoring is right back on the top toolbar. Now that my levels are in a good state, I’ll click on this and stop monitoring. I mentioned that when the audio goes too far over to the right, you start losing some detail and it clips the sound that you’re recording. And to demonstrate, let’s just take a quick example. Over here, on the left-hand side, I’m going to click on this record button. This is now recording me speaking, and you can see the waveforms of my speech. It’s basically over here. The horizontal is the time and the vertical here is the loudness of my voice. Now if I turn my microphone levels all the way up to the top, look at that. Here you’ll see that it clips my voice. So right here, you notice that the wave is just getting cut off on top and you just see this flat surface. So once again, setting your levels at the beginning is a really good practice. And speaking of good practices, it’s also good before you’re ready to record, let’s say you’re going to sit down and record an interview, or maybe you’re going to record one of your classes. Maybe it’s an hour-long class. Take a sample recording just to make sure everything sounds good first. The last thing you want to do is get to the end of your recording, only to realize that you clipped the audio throughout. That’s the last thing you want. Now that we have all of this setup out of the way, I’m ready to start recording a commercial for the Kevin Cookie Company. Here I’m going to go over and delete this track right here that I recorded. I’ll click on this X icon, right here. Just like I did in the test, I can go right up here and click on the red record icon. I’ll click on here to start the recording, and once I’m all done, I’ll click on the stop icon right here. Now, as a good practice, don’t start speaking immediately after clicking the record button. Just wait a moment or two and then start speaking. This way you have a little bit of buffer at the beginning of the clip. We’ll be able to go back, and we could remove that later, but it’s just kind of a good practice to get the room noise, especially if you want to get rid of background noise. And later on, I’ll show you how we can do that, but for now I’ll click on this record icon. Mmm, the Kevin Cookie Company makes some of the most delicious cookies that you’ve probably never had before. If you’ve ever had Mrs. Fields, Nabisco, or other so called cookie brands, you haven’t experienced a good cookie yet. Find the nearest location at KevinCookieCompany.com and enjoy the best. I’ve now finished my recording and you might have noticed that towards the end, the volume level was a little bit lower. I backed up away from the microphone by mistake. In a little bit, I’ll show you how we can correct some of these issues. For now, let’s take this scroll bar and let’s move to the very beginning of the recording. Right here on the screen you can see a set of wave forms, and this is basically a visual representation of my speech. Time is the horizontal and then loudness of my voice is the vertical. So once again, here near the end, you see that my voice was a lot softer as I moved away from the microphone and so the waveform is a lot smaller. And here you notice that it’s a lot bigger because the sound was a lot louder. You can match my speech to these waveforms, so right at the beginning is when I said Mmm and so you see that waveform and then here you see my speech. And as I’m speaking, some letters are a little bit louder than others, or some words are a little bit louder. And here you can see when I emphasize certain words, you see that the wave spikes a little bit, so this is a quick way where you can visualize what your speech looks like. To play my audio, to hear how it sounds, I can go up to the top left-hand corner and I can click on this play icon. When I hover over this, you’ll see some of the associated shortcut keys. Here for example, I could also press the spacebar, and if I press shift together with the spacebar, that’ll loop play. Right here, I could click my mouse over here and this will set the play head to this start position. So let me press the spacebar and let’s play this. When I press this spacebar again, it’ll stop playing and the play head goes right back to where I started. So, if I press spacebar again. It’ll simply play that clip again. Now, let’s say that I’m playing through and instead of having it stop and go back to the beginning, what if I simply want to pause it and then resume? Well, right up here on the top bar, I have a pause button. When I hover over it’s associated with the shortcut key P. So here let’s play again and this time I’m going to pause. Mmm and I press P to pause right there, and when I press P again, it’ll simply resume. The Kevin Cookie Company. So those are a few ways that you could start playing back your audio. As I’m playing and pausing, you’ll notice a few different things on my waveform. Right here, this line indicates the start point. So, once I hit spacebar again, it’ll reset to this point and right here you’ll see where the play head currently is. So, when I press play, it’ll pick up from this specific point. When we hovered over the play icon, you notice that there was a loop play option. So, if I just pressed shift and spacebar, it would play through the entire commercial, go back to the beginning, and play again, but I could also select some of my waveform and then play that again and again. Let’s say for example I want to play my Mmm on repeat. Right up here, I’ll select the selection tool. I could also press F1. There you’ll see the shortcut key and I get to highlight a portion of my waveform. And right here I’ll press shift and spacebar. Mmm, Mmm, so there you could play audio again and again. I’ll only play it twice. You probably don’t want to hear it more than that. With the selection tool, I have a portion of my waveform selected. Now let’s say I wanted to include more in this selection, I could hover my mouse over towards the end and you see this finger icon appear. I could click there, and I can expand my selection, and I could do the same on the other side. I could also click there, and I could expand or reduce the selection. As an alternative, I could also press the shift key, so here I could press shift there, and maybe I press shift out here, and I could expand my selection. So this is a quick way to select a portion, and now let’s say I just want to play this portion, once again, I’ll press spacebar and it’ll just play this. The Kevin Cookie Company makes some of the most delicious cookies that, so there you see how I can just play a specific selection of my audio. Now some other neat tricks, here I can highlight a portion of my clip and when I hover over up on top here on the timeline, I can highlight this section here and it’ll automatically start playing. If you’ve ever had Mrs. Fields, Nabisco, that’s yet another way I can playback a certain portion of my audio track. Especially as you start recording a lot of audio, you might want to jump to the beginning, or maybe you want to jump to the end. You can use the scroll bar on the bottom to move forward or back, or up here, you can also click on these icons, so here if I click this, this will jump me to the start, or I could jump to the end. Once again, when I hover over, here you’ll see the associated shortcut key. So, I could press the home key and that’ll jump me to the beginning. Or I could press the end key and that’ll jump me to the end. So just some neat shortcut keys that you can use to move around your track. Now that we’ve looked at some of the different playback tools and the selection tool up on top, let’s see what some of these other tools are. And let’s start with the zoom tool. I’ll click on this, and I can click on my waveform to zoom in. So here I can see more of the details of my waveform. I’m simply clicking the left mouse button and that’ll zoom me in more and more. I can click the right key and that’ll zoom me out again so I could both zoom in and zoom out. And if you remember in the introduction when we talked about the project rate or the sample rate, I mentioned that when we record audio, you’re simply recording samples of that audio. So once again, it’s like the frame rate of video. So here when I zoom all the way in, you can actually see that visualized. So here you see all of these little dots. Each one of them represents a sample, so it’s kind of like the frames in a video and together these mimic what the actual waveform sounded like. Here I can zoom out again by pressing the right mouse button and I’ll zoom out a whole bunch. Now you might remember the first sound I made was this Mmm sound because the cookies look so delish. Now with the zoom tool selected, I can also go over and highlight this section of the waveform, and when I do that, it’ll zoom in so I just see that area that I highlighted. To zoom in and out, I can also use these other buttons. Here I can zoom in and I can zoom out again, so it effectively does the same thing that the zoom in tool does. However, with the zoom tool, I could both zoom in and out just with my mouse. To zoom in and out, I could also use these icons up on top. Here I can zoom in and there I’ll zoom out. It effectively does the same thing that the zoom tool does. Now, let’s say I want to see my entire waveform all on the screen. I have this icon over here that fits the project to the width. When I press this, here I can see the entire recording all in one place. So far, my commercial has the audio track and I think it sounds pretty good, but I also want to include some music, just to make it a really high quality commercial, and I can very easily import audio into Audacity. Here I’ll go up to the file menu and I could go to file, open, and here you’ll see the shortcut key is also control O. When I click on this, I can navigate to where I have the music on my computer or where I have whatever the audio track is. As an alternative, I could also go to the file menu. Here I could go to import, and I could import audio here as well. Now even easier, I can also simply take some audio that I have on my computer, let’s say in File Explorer, and I can drag and drop it into Audacity and that is just another way to get sound into Audacity. My project is starting to come together. I have my music. I have some voiceover on here. I want to save it, just to ensure that I don’t lose anything. Up here in the top left-hand corner, I’ll click on file and then there’s the option to save the project. I’m going to go to save project as. Now there are a few different options for saving. When I save the Audacity project, that’ll save all of the different tracks and any of the different audio modifications that I make here. So, if I ever want to go back and maybe I want to modify some of this, I can very easily do that. But later on, let’s say I want to distribute this commercial more broadly, I can click on the file menu and here I could go to export, and I could export it as, let’s say an MP3 or wav. I’m not done doing all my edits yet, so I’m not going to do this yet, but I just wanted to call out what the difference is between saving a project and then exporting your project. For now, I’m still working on this, so let’s go to save project and I’ll save project as. This opens up a save dialog and here I could type in my file name and here you’ll see that it saves it as an AUP3 project file. That looks good, so I’ll click on save. Phew, I feel a lot better that I saved things now. I’d hate to have to go back and do all of that work again. So, I have my music here and I have my voice here and you might notice that these waveforms for the music are a lot bigger than the waveforms for my voice. Let me go to the very beginning and let’s play this to hear what it sounds like. So, as I was playing that, you probably heard that the music overpowers the voice pretty greatly, and you can’t really hear anything that I’m saying, so I need to adjust the levels down here on this music, and right over here on the left-hand side we have the gain. This is a way I could lower the gain, or I could raise the gain. I’m going to play it and I’ll adjust the gain until it’s right at the right point, where I could hear the speech a lot better. So, I’ll play it, and as it’s playing, let me adjust this. Mmm, the Kevin Cookie Company makes some of the most delicious cookies that you’ve probably never had before. So that’s sounding a lot better. You could hear the speech really nicely and you’ll also hear the music, but it’s not overpowering anymore. So here I was able to lower the levels or lower the gain on just the music. Now that I have the level set correctly, I want to go in and I want to make some tweaks to the voice over, but as I’m doing that, I don’t want to hear the music as well. Luckily, I can silence the music so this way I can just focus on my voice. Right over here, I can click on mute and that’ll mute out the music and that way here if I play it, I only hear my voice, so this way it won’t disturb me while I’m editing. Now as an alternative, I’ll click on mute again. So, this brings this track back on. Let’s say I had multiple tracks and I just want to hear the voice. Up here, I can click on solo and by clicking on solo, this will be the only track that I listen to, and it’ll mute out all of the other tracks down below. OK, now that I have my track set, so this is the only one I hear, I want to make some changes, and I was recently informed by our legal team, no surprise there, that I probably shouldn’t talk down our competition like Mrs. Fields and the Nabisco. They might sue, you know, we’re such a good company. We’ve been driving so many sales, I wouldn’t be surprised if they try something like that. Now I want to cut out that portion of my audio, but where is it in my audio? Let’s play it back and as soon as I find that section, I’ll delete it. So, let’s play it to see where it is. Mmm, the Kevin Cookie Company makes some of the most delicious cookies that you’ve probably never had before, so I haven’t heard it yet in this beginning portion, so I know it’s not there, so I’m going to leave these waves as they are. Let me bring the play head right here and let’s listen to this next section. Now one thing you’ll notice is, I paused between these different sections, so that’s why there’s just a straight line down here. There’s basically no loudness to my voice because I’m not speaking, so you’ll just see this flat waveform. Let’s see if it’s in this section. If you’ve ever had Mrs. Fields, Nabisco, or other so called cookie brands, you haven’t experienced a good cookie yet. And that’s the section where I refer to these different companies. So, I want to cut this out. To delete this, I’m going to go to the top and once again, I’ll select this selection tool. You can also press F1. And over here I’ll simply highlight this section. Now once again, you can use the finger tool to expand or contract the size of the selection, but this looks pretty good. Now I want to remove this right here, so next I could simply click on the delete key and that’ll remove that portion of my audio. Now, if I play it, find the nearest, you’ll hear that it simply jumps to the next section where I call out the website. So, I think that sounds pretty good. I think the legal team won’t be worried anymore. Now that I’ve addressed that issue, I want to look at the next thing that I need to fix, and here you’ll notice that the intro waveform is a lot larger than the website waveform, so it’s a lot smaller, and those volume levels aren’t the same. Here, I’ll just play a quick example. Ever had before, find the new. There you’ll just notice that the volume levels are very different, and luckily there are a few ways that I can address this. First, I want to show you how we can use what’s called the envelope tool. When I click on this, you’ll notice my track changes a little bit. Here I’ll go back to selection, and I’ll click on envelope. And here you see a dark gray line and a lighter gray line. Right here I can click where I want to make an adjustment, so there’s the first frame and then I’ll click on the second one. And maybe I want it to start rising right about there. So, there you see that I can raise the volume level by dragging that up. Here I’ll drag it right up near the top. I’ll place another one over here and I can bring it down again if I want. So, this is a quick way where I can use this tool to adjust the volume levels. Now, one thing you’ll notice though is even though I’m dragging this up, it’s not quite enough to get this volume level the same as the other one, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to use the envelope tool to bring it all the way up. So let me actually get rid of these adjustments that I made. I could simply click on these little circles that were inserted, and if I pull it all the way up here, that’ll remove all of the changes that I made. So here brought it right back to where it was at the beginning. I’ll go back to the selection tool and let me try another way to get this volume up. Next, I want to try an effect to see if I can amplify the volume right here. Right up in the effect menu, there’s an option for amplify, and let me select this section right here and I’ll go up to effect and then amplify. Right here, I have to either enter in the amplification or I could enter in the new peak amplitude. How do I know what numbers to enter in there? Well to figure out the numbers, we’re going to listen to the audio here at the beginning and we’ll use this as a reference for setting the amplitude over here. I’ll go back to the beginning and let’s play this clip. Makes some of the most delicious cookies that you’ve probably never had before. Here, as we were listening to it, up here, we could see what levels it peaked at, and here it’s around negative 7 or let’s say negative 8. So, I want this to match the playback over here. So once again I’ll highlight this, let me go to effect, amplify, and right down, here I’ll use this slider to go right down to about let’s say negative 7. So that aligns with the other clip right here and then I’ll click on OK. And now look at that, the waveforms match much more closely, so the volume level is similar across these two. My commercial is starting to come along nicely. Let me go back and listen to what it sounds like so far. I’ll press the home key on my keyboard. I could also click up here and that brings me to the beginning. Here I’ll press the spacebar and let’s listen to it. One thing I don’t like is it takes a moment before it starts and when I’m on a radio station I’m paying for every second. I don’t want some dead time there. Here I’ll zoom in just a little bit so you could see that gap at the beginning. Now I could take the selection tool like we did before. I could highlight that and then press delete. However, I want to show you how you can use the time shift tool. So, I’m going to deselect that and let’s select the time shift tool. Right here, I’ll go down to the second track and you see my icon right here represents the time shift tool. Here I can click on this track, and I could adjust the position of it. So here you could get precise positions for all of your tracks. Here I’ll place it so it’s right near the beginning when the music kicks off. So, if I click on home now and now play, you’ll hear that it immediately starts. Now one other problem, I want my speech to start right when the drum kicks in on the music. So, I want to align this portion right here with this wave right here. So here I’ll click on the top track and here I can adjust the position here. So right now, my speech will start right when the drum kicks in. I’ll move my play head right to here and let’s hear what that sounds like. Mmm, the Kevin Cookie Company. That’s sounding pretty good. Now I’m paying for a 30 second radio commercial and you’ll see that my audio cuts off right before the 20 second mark, so I want to kick off with this audio here, but I want a little bit more of a separation between these different sentences, so I basically want to insert a gap. There are a few different ways I can do this. I’ll put my play head right here and I’ll go to the top menu called generate. Right here, I can generate silence. I’ll click on this and right here I can choose the format, I’ll go with hours, minutes and seconds and maybe I’ll put in five additional seconds and then click on OK. So, here now my speech starts right at about the 25 second mark or right before then, so it better fills out my commercial and here I have my silence in between. As an alternative, I can put my play head right here, I can go to edit and right down here under clip boundaries, I can split these clips, so you see this line appearing indicating that these are now separate clips. Once again, I can go over here and select the time shift tool and then I can position my second clip wherever I want. So here I can move it back a little bit or I could just leave it right there and this will be silence in between these two clips. Now I don’t know about you, but I really like this Mmm at the beginning and I would love to incorporate it into this commercial again. So just like I could use on my keyboard to copy things, you press control C and to paste you use control V or to cut you use control X. Here I can highlight the Mmm at the beginning of my audio clip and I’ll press control C. As an alternative, you could go up to the edit menu and here too you can also copy, and this will refresh you to what all of the shortcut keys are. And right here let me go towards the end and maybe right at about this point, I’ll insert another Mmm. So right here I’ll press control V and that’ll paste it in. Here now, I’ll play the ending and we’ll hear the insertion of the Mmm. Find the nearest location at KevinCookieCompany.com and enjoy the best. Mmm. All right, that’s sounding pretty good. I like that. So far, the overall commercial seems OK, but I think I can make it even better. When I’m speaking, I want the music to be just a tad bit quieter and then when I’m not speaking, I want it to be a little louder, and then once I speak again, I want it to be a little bit quieter. Now I can use the envelope tool and here I could insert different points in here. So let’s say maybe over here as I’m speaking, I’ll lower the volume here, but I’d rather just rely on an effect to do all of that for me. I’m going to undo all of these changes and let’s see how we can use an effect. To do this, let’s go to the top menu here and under effects, there’s something called auto duck. Basically, what that means is when I’m speaking, this sound is going to duck out a little bit and then once I stop speaking, the sound volume will come up. Let’s actually test this out to see how it works. To be able to do this, I need to move my voice or my speech to the bottom track and it’s pretty easy to shift this order. I’ll click over here and press and you see it turn into this hand icon. I can pull the track down and this places it second. Next, I want to duck the music track up here based on my voice. So over here I’ll go to the very beginning and with the selection tool, here I’ll simply select this entire track and I really only care right up to about this point here. Right here I’ll go up to effect and let me click on auto duck. This opens up a prompt where I can configure how the auto duck works. Basically, these are different settings where if it detects me speaking, how quickly should it duck, and then how long should it stay in the duck position before it recovers. You could go through and you could test out these different settings to see how it works for you, and down below you can even preview it to hear what it sounds like. For now, I’ll stick with all of the defaults and click on OK. And take a look at that, it automatically lowered the volumes when I’m speaking, and as soon as I stop speaking, the volume kicks in and then it quiets down again. Let’s go to the beginning to hear what this sounds like. Mmm, the Kevin Cookie Company makes some of the most delicious cookies that you’ve probably never had before. So that’s pretty nice. This way you can hear me speaking a little bit better and then when I stop speaking, the music kicks in a little bit more. That sounds pretty good, and it’s a really cool effect that you can use to make sure that your music or maybe the background sound doesn’t interfere with the speech. Now I mentioned that I have a 30 second commercial, so here let me zoom out so I can see my entire project. Right at the 30 second mark, you see that the music continues playing for well over 1 min. So here I can simply click into 30 seconds. Let me highlight this whole area and then I’ll press the delete key and that’ll remove that whole section. At the very end of my track, though, I’ll go to the very end and let’s play it to hear what this sounds like. You’ll notice at the end of my commercial is just a very abrupt end, and I’d rather have it fade out. Luckily, I can apply a fade. Here, I’ll select the end area and let me go back up to effects. Within effects, I’ll click on fade out, and look at that, it now fades it out. So, when I play it, we’ll hear a nice gradual fade. That sounds a lot better. Next, I want to show you another effect that you can use to remove background noise. Now you’ll notice on my waveform where I’m speaking, there’s not very much background noise. My room is a pretty quiet environment, however, let’s say maybe you had the hum of a fan or maybe an air conditioner. You can very easily remove that. Here, I’ll select the selection tool, let me highlight this area. Once again, I mentioned when you’re recording, it’s always a good practice to record some of the room noise. So, if you need to remove background noise, you have a sample to work off of. I’ll select this area here, I’ll go up to effect, and right here there’s the option called noise reduction. Right here, I can click on get noise profile. This basically helps Audacity understand what that background noise is. I’ll click on that and now it understands. Next, I need to select my entire track now where I want to remove the background noise. I’ll select this whole area. Here I can go up to effect, noise reduction, and now it knows the profile and now I can apply the noise reduction. I have different settings that I can configure, and you could play with these to see what they do. Now this will reduce it, and this will do the opposite where it tries to keep the background noise and it removes everything else. So, let’s click on OK to hear what this sounds like. Mmm, the Kevin Cookie Company. Now to me it sounds mostly the same because this room doesn’t have much background noise, but if you had a fan or an air conditioner, it would remove all of that sound. Lastly, I want to show you how you can use one more effect called the compressor, and so what does a compressor do? Well, when we look at my waveform down here, you’ll notice that some sections are a little bit louder where I emphasize a word and other sections are a little bit quieter, so there’s a large dynamic range and as I’m speaking some of the quieter parts might get lost. So, for example, let’s say maybe you’re whispering, or maybe you yell, you might not be able to hear all of those parts equally. So, I want to even these out, so I’m going to go right up to the effect menu, and I’ll select the compressor. This opens up the compressor and here you have a variety of different settings that you can configure to make sure that it works the best for your needs. If you want to learn about this, I’d recommend searching for compressor and you can read about what these different settings do. For now, I simply want to pull my highs down and my lows a little higher just to even everything out. I’ll leave all the defaults where they are and then click on OK. And here now you can see my waveform has been adjusted. One thing you’re probably starting to realize now, Audacity has a massive variety of different effects that you can apply. If you want to make changes to your audio, chances are there is an effect that will help you with that. You can go through and experiment with them to see what they do. There are some really fun ones too. You can change your speed. You could change your pitch. There are all sorts of different things that you can apply to your audio. For now, this sounds pretty good. I’m going to go back and play my commercial one more time to make sure that it sounds how I want it to be. Mmm, the Kevin Cookie Company makes some of the most delicious cookies that you’ve probably never had before. Find the nearest location at KevinCookieCompany.com and enjoy the best. Mmm. All right, well that sounds pretty good. I’m now ready to distribute my audio file. I want to send it to the radio station so they can start playing this. I’m going to go up to the file menu and this time instead of going to save project, we’re going to go down to export and here I could export as many different file types. I could export as an MP3. This is a more compressed version of my audio file, so the quality might not be the highest, but the file size will be pretty small. I could also export as a wav. This is uncompressed, but it’s also a much larger file size. This is a pretty short clip. It’s only 30 seconds, so I’ll go with wav. This opens up a dialogue and I can type in a name for my file. Here I see the save type and I can change the file type here as well. Down below I can also indicate how I want to encode it, and by default it’s set to 16 bit, but let me shift it to 32 bit, just for slightly higher quality and then I’ll click on save. I get a prompt telling me that all of my separate tracks will be mixed down and it’ll be exported as one stereo file. That sounds fine, so I’ll click on OK. Here I could enter in metadata for my file, so I could type in an artist name, a track title. So, if you open this in something like iTunes or some other app, it’ll retrieve all of these different values and display them. I’ll just leave them all blank for now and then click OK. My audio file is now successfully created and here I see a wav file with my commercial. Now that I’ve saved my audio file, I could distribute it. I could email it. I could upload it to a website. I could send it to the radio station and finally the world could hear about these amazing cookies. All right, well that’s how you can get started using Audacity. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up. To see more videos like this, please consider subscribing. Also, if you want to see me cover any other topics in the future, make sure to leave a note down below. All right, well that’s all I had for you today. I hope you enjoyed, and as always, I hope to see you next time, bye.