Audacity is one of the best audio editing platforms in the world, and it’s absolutely free. Audacity can be used for a number of things, from editing your film audio in post-production to running your own podcast – it has all the tools you need to record and edit high-quality audio. In this article we will have a look at the top audacity tips when editing your audio, to ensure you get the most out of your audio editing.
Let’s check the top Audacity tips out below!
Remove silence in Audacity
When editing audio, you’ll find you will come across a lot of long silences which you’ll want to cut down. Audacity offers a tool that removes this automatically, rather than letting you trawl through and remove each part of silence manually.
Tor remove silence in Audacity automatically, use the selection tool and drag over the audio that contains the silence you wish to remove.
Once you’ve got the block of audio you wish to remove the silence from, select Effect > Truncate Silence from the menu and edit the settings from the popup. Make sure it only removes the silence from the correct parts, once you’ve done the above have a quick listen to ensure the audio removals all correct.
The duration is the amount of time Audacity waits until removing the silence, and the threshold is the quietest part of audio that Audacity will keep in.
Make sure the threshold and duration is set correctly to ensure the most efficient silence removal process.
How to rip audio in Audacity
Ripping audio is an important process in audio editing and Audacity thankfully makes this a pretty straightforward and efficient process. Here are our Audacity tips on how to rip audio with ease.
Before ripping the audio make sure you have installed the FFmpeg library, this allows Audacity to work with standard video files.
To install this, simply head to the Audcity preferences library.
Here’s how to rip the audio:
- Go to File > Preferences from the menu, if you’re on Mac go to Audacity > Preferences.
- The in the preferences menu select Libraries.
- Then click on the download button on the FFmpeg library link.
- This will then open a link to the Audacity manual and shares the instructions on how you can install the FFmpeg library.
- After you have installed the FFmpeg library, you can now go to File > Open in Audactiy’s menu and select any video file you have and it will import the audio in the video file right into your audacity files.
And that’s it, that is how you rip audio from your video files in Audacity.
Also, don’t forget you can How to recover deleted audio files from Audacity in a couple of clicks!
How to remove background noise in Audacity
Imagine if you’ve been recording all week, and you’ve finally wrapped up your short film, you can’t wait to get into the editing suite to start post production, then bam! You have an annoying buzzing sound in the audio of your key scene where the protagonist confesses to all.
Do you have to grab the cast and crew for a reshoot? Nope, all you need to do is use this handy background noise removal tool to get that annoying sound from your audio removed.
Let’s have a look how to do this:
Firstly find the audio in which you wish to remove the background noise and select it using the selection tool.
Use the selection tool to highlight the part of audio and select Effect > Noise Reduction, a window will pop up asking you to get the “Noise Profile” click it.
Audacity now knows what the sound of the “noise” is in your clip and will now be able to filter this out automatically. To do this select the rest of your track and go to Effect > Noise Reduction, but this time use it to lower the noise to your preferred level.
Remember not to distort your sound too much, a little noise isn’t a bad thing!
READ MORE: How to remove background noise in Audacity
Amplifying audio in Audacity
This is one of the best Audacity tips and a pretty straightforward one as well!
Most of the time you work with audio files that are set as loud as possible, but occasionally you’ll work with a very quiet audio file and will need to amplify it to make sense of it.
To do this click Effect > Normalise to amplify it without distortion, or you can click F5 to select the envelope tool, then click and drag vertically on the audio file. You can then alter the amplification this way, remember not to amplify too much or it’ll cause a slight bit of distortion.
We hope you enjoyed this article on the Top Audacity tips when audio editing on a budget, here are a few more articles to help you with your filmmaking!
- How to remove background noise in Audacity
- Top audio editing tips on Audacity for filmmakers
- How to split and join audio in Audacity
- Top 8 Transitions in Premiere Pro
- What’s the best export settings in Premiere Pro CC for YouTube?
- How to reduce background noise in premiere pro
- The best acting books: 5 books all actors MUST read
