You want to select your room tone portion by placing your cursor at the beginning of the silence and “wipe right” by holding down on the left edge index finger motion and drag right. For noise reduction, do not select all audio.Leave default settings as is, for each filter, and click OK.Pull down Effect menu, choose in the above order (Compressor, Normalize, Noise Reduction).Command-A (Mac) or Control-A (PC) selects the audio which turns the waveform from grey to white.Place your cursor, anywhere on the waveform, using your index finger on the left edge of the mouse.In order to filter a sound file, the audio must be selected:

You do this so that gaps between audio don’t resonate as much on the sound meter/audible playback. Every room, even soundproofed rooms, have a room tone.Ĭapturing that “noise” will remove that tone throughout the entire file. Noise Reduction – It is good practice when recording audio to allow a 10-20 second segment of silence.

It also equalizes the waveform between left and right channels.

Normalize – Sets the peak amplitude to a range that avoids clipping (jargon term for a volume peak that is too loud for the file).

Compressor – Reduces the dynamic range of a recording which will increase the gain (jargon term for volume) to an ideal level throughout the recording.

Under the pull down menu for Effect, select in this order, filter one at a time: When I edit a podcast, the first thing I do is run several filters in sequence.

Next to the speaker icon, (center), is the sound meter which displays the sound on playback measured in decibels.

Spyglass + (Zoom in) Spyglass – (Zoom out).

Selection tool (looks like an I with bar on top and bottom).

Icons above the waveform to note, left to right:.

Pull down menus we will be using: File, Edit, Tracks, Effect.

It will “paint” the waveform, in blue, along the timeline.

File>Open>select recorded audio file to edit from folder on your computer.

If you haven’t already, download and install Audacity.

Adding effects like fade-ins, fade-outs and auto-ducking music.

Using filters and noise reduction to improve audio listenability.

Raising or lowering the gain (audio) to YouTube/CD levels.

Loading recorded audio for sound improvement:.

Scope of this guide: Using the free audio editing software, Audacity, to edit recorded podcast audio.

The audacity to podcast