The Alternative Audacity Manual

CONTENTS

1
Introduction
What can you do with Audacity?
Audacity is a program that manipulates digital audio waveforms. In addition to recording sounds directly from within the program, it imports many sound file formats, including WAV, AIFF, MP3, and Ogg Vorbis. PCM formats of 8,16,24 and 32-bits can be imported and exported. Although Audacity is a very powerful audio editor that works with an unlimited number tracks of virtually unlimited size, it cannot do everything. Audacity cannot record more than two channels at once on many systems. Some support for multi-track recording is included, but it does not support very many systems yet. Audacity opens MIDI files, but it is not a MIDI editor, and its MIDI features are extremely limited.

Audacity works with tracks, that contain one audio file. This file is editable and all actions are undoable. Undo's are instantaneous. Audacity is not only distributed free of charge, but you are also free to do almost anything you want with it. Audacity is distributed under the terms of the General Public License (GPL). You are free to use the program for personal or commercial purposes. You are also free to give it away or sell it. The source code
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to this program is freely available on the web, and you are free to modify it for your own use. However any changes you make must also be distributed under the GPL. Audacity was started in the fall of 1999 by Dominic Mazzoni while he was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. He was working on a research project with his advisor, Professor Roger Dannenberg, and they needed a tool that would let them visualize audio analysis algorithms. Over time, this program developed into a general audio editor, and other people started helping out. Today, Audacity is developed using Sourceforge, an online site that allows people around the world to collaborate on free software projects. See http://www.sourceforge.net for more information. Dozens of people have contributed to Audacity, and progress is continually accelerating.

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Installation
An install file can be downloaded from the Audacity project page at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/ . You will need to download the file which corresponds to your computer system.

Installing on Windows
Download the Windows .exe file. And just double-click on it to start the installer. If you prefer not to use the Installer program, you can also download Audacity as a ZIP file, which you can decompress using WinZip or any other extraction program. From the browser, select the option to "Run from current location". This launches the Audacity setup program, which will install the Audacity program files and create an entry in the start menu.

Installing on Mac
Download the .sit file. You need a recent version of StuffIt Expander. StuffIt Expander comes with all Macintoshes and is usually configured by default with all Mac web browsers. If Audacity does not decompress automatically, drag "audacity.sit" to StuffIt Expander to decompress it. There is no need to install Audacity. Just drag the Audacity folder to your Applications folder, or wherever else you would like to put it. To uninstall, just drag the entire folder to the trash.

Installing on Unix /Linux

First, ensure that the wxGTK is installed; a link can be found from our Linux page - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/linux. Be sure that you use the appropriate version of wxGTK - Audacity 1.2.x requires wxGTK 2.4.x, and it will not work with any other version.
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Installing Plug-Ins LAME MP3 encoder

Because of software patents, MP3 encoding software is not distributed wit Audacity. Follow these instructions to use the free LAME encoder to export MP3 files with Audacity.

Windows
1. Go to the LAME download page . http://lame.buanzo.com.ar/ 2. Under "For Audacity on Windows", left-click the link "Lame v3.98.3 for Audacity on Windows.exe" and save the file anywhere on your computer 3. Double-click "Lame v3.98.3 for Audacity on Windows.exe" to launch it (you can safely ignore any warnings that the "publisher could not be verified") 4. Follow the Setup instructions to install LAME for Audacity, and do not change the offered destination location of "C:\Program Files\Lame for Audacity" You should now be able to export MP3s without any further configuration. Troubleshooting:If there are any problems, they will likely be due to a conflict with Audacity still trying to detect the path to an older lame_enc.dll file. To correct this: 1. Ensure there are no older versions of lame_enc.dll in any locations where Audacity detects it, namely: o C:\Program Files\Lame for Audacity (where the installer puts the new .dll) o the Audacity installation folder (usually C:\Program Files\Audacity 1.3 Beta (Unicode), or in the Plug-Ins folder inside that 2. Exit Audacity and navigate to the 1.3 preferences .cfg file at: o Windows 2000/XP: Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\Audacity\audacity.cfg o Windows Vista/7: Users\<user name>\AppData\Roaming\Audacity\audacity.cfg.
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3. Open audacity.cfg in a text editor such as Notepad, and delete the two lines starting with: o [MP3] MP3LibPath= 4. Save the changes to audacity.cfg and restart Audacity In order to see audacity.cfg, you may need to set the operating system to show hidden files and folders. See instructions for Windows 7 and Windows versions before 7. Note that the above four steps will remove old paths to lame_enc.dll for Audacity version 1.3 and later only. If you still use (or have ever used) Audacity 1.2, that version will continue to look for the .dll in the location stored in its own Preferences setting. Merely exiting Audacity and deleting audacity.cfg will not remove old paths to lame_enc.dll for 1.3 if you have ever previously used a 1.2 version. In that case Audacity 1.3 and later would still look up the path from the 1.2 Preferences setting.

Mac OS X
1. Go to the LAME download page 2. Download Lame Library v3.98.2 for Audacity on OSX.dmg 3. When you have finished downloading, double-click the .dmg to mount it, then go to the Finder (in Safari, "Lame Library v3.98.2 for Audacity.pkg" will be extracted automatically after downloading) 4. Double-click "Lame Library v3.98.2 for Audacity.pkg"; this will install the LAME binary "libmp3lame.dylib" in /usr/local/lib/audacity 5. Audacity should detect LAME automatically when you export as MP3. If Audacity cannot find LAME: 1. Click Audacity > Preferences: Libraries 2. Click "Locate..." under "MP3 Export Library", then "Browse..." in the "Locate Lame" dialog 3. Navigate to /usr/local/lib/audacity or wherever libmp3lame.dylib is, select it, click "Open" then "OK" and "OK"

Linux/Unix
Most distributions have some sort of package manager that fetches software packages from the Internet and installs them for you. Open that package manager, search for LAME, and install it if it is not already installed. The following are detailed instructions for installing LAME using the Synaptic package manager on recent Ubuntu or Debian systems: 1. Open Synaptic: o In GNOME (the default desktop environment for Ubuntu and many other systems), access Synaptic by clicking System > Administration o In KDE there will be a similar menu accessible from the bottomleft of the screen 2. Enter your password when asked for it 3. In the Synaptic window, choose "Settings", then Repositories 4. In the "Ubuntu Software" tab, check the box for "multiverse", then hit the Close button 5. Back in the main Synaptic Window, type lame in the "Quick search" box 6. The search results will show the packages lame and libmp3lame0 at the top of the list; mark both for installation by double-clicking 7. Click "Apply", and on OK for any warnings; the LAME software will automatically download and install 8. Right-click over the entry for "libmp3lame0" > Properties 9. On the "Installed Files" tab, note the location of "libmp3lame.so.0", probably at /usr/lib/libmp3lame.so.0 10. Close all the Synaptic windows 11. Open Audacity, click Edit > Preferences then on "Libraries" in the list on the left 12. In "MP3 Export Library" check if a LAME version number displays to right of "MP3 Library Version". If so, LAME has been detected and you should now be able to export MP3 and skip the remainder of these instructions. If the MP3 Library is stated as "not found":
1. 2.

Click the "Locate... button In the "Locate Lame" dialog that appears, click "Browse"

3.

In the "Where is libmp3lame.so.0?" dialog, navigate to the location you noted in step 9, select "libmp3lame.so.0", click "Open", then "OK" and "OK" to exit Preferences

FFmpeg Import/Export Library

Please follow both the 1. Download and 2. Installation steps below.

1. Download
Windows: 1. Download the FFmpeg installer. from http://www.gaclrecords.org.uk/ Double-click the .exe file to launch the installer. 2. Read the License and click Next, Next and Install to install the required files to C:\Program Files\FFmpeg for Audacity. Alternatively download the zip file and extract the contents to a folder called "FFmpeg_2009_07_20_for_Audacity_on_Windows"anywhere on your computer. Mac: 1. Download the FFmpeg installer. From http://audacity.homerow.net 2. When you have finished downloading, double-click the .dmg to mount it, then go to the Finder (in Safari, "FFmpeg Libraries for Audacity.pkg" will be extracted automatically after downloading). 3. Double-click "FFmpeg Libraries for Audacity.pkg" to launch the installer. 4. Follow the instructions to perform a "standard installation". 5. The libraries will be installed in /usr/local/lib/audacity. Alternatively, you can build Audacity from SVN and link to a system copy of FFmpeg built from source.
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Linux/Unix: You may download (or build) a suitable FFmpeg library for your own purposes. To build, obtain the source code from the FFmpeg project. If you download a pre-built library, this might be either a "shared" or "static" build. A static build consists of a single libavformat library, whereas a shared build has at least three libraries (libavformat, libavcodec and libavutil). It is recommended to use a shared build, but Audacity will also work with a static build. If you compile Audacity from source code, it will link to the installed FFmpeg headers, which should always be compatible with an installed FFmpeg binary.

Audacity 1.3.8 or later requires either FFmpeg 0.5 from Spring 2009, or a later library or package from that year. The Windows and Mac FFmpeg installers from the links above will always include a compatible version of FFmpeg. For users compiling Audacity and/or FFmpeg: o FFmpeg from SVN after June 1st 2010 may cause Audacity not to compile with error "invalid conversion from int (*) (URLContext*, unsigned char*, int) to int (*)(URLContext*, const unsigned char*, int)" in FFmpeg.cpp:257. Workaround: change src/FFmpeg.cpp line 207 from "static int ufile_write(URLContext *h, unsigned char *buf, int size)" to "static int ufile_write(URLContext *h, const unsigned char *buf, int size)" o Any FFmpeg libraries or packages built in 2010 may not be recognised by Audacity (Help > Show Log will list an error "undefined symbol: match_ext"). Workaround: Re-compile Audacity and change all instances of "match_ext" in ../src/FFmpeg.h and ../src/FFmpeg.cpp to "av_match_ext". o AAC exports will be incorrect unless when compiling FFmpeg you disable the built-in AAC encoder (--disable-encoder=aac).

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Installation
The first time you use FFmpeg to import or export, Audacity will ask you to configure Preferences to locate the FFmpeg library. To do this, click Edit > Preferences: Libraries and click the Locate... button, then Browse....

If the "FFmpeg Library Version" says "not found": 1. Click "Find Library". 2. If a "Success" message indicates Audacity has now automatically detected the library and asks if you want to detect them manually, click "No", then OK to close Preferences. 3. If the "Locate FFmpeg" dialog appears, click "Browse...". 4. Navigate to the avformat library, and select it. It may have different names, such as "avformat-52.dll" on Windows, "libavformat-52.dylib" on Mac or "libavformat.so.52" on Linux. 5. Click "Open" then "OK", and "OK" again to close Preferences. "FFmpeg Library Version" should now show a number. If not, you may have installed the wrong libraries. Click the "Download" button to obtain the correct library for your operating system. Note for Mac users: If Audacity reports the version of FFmpeg is "incompatible", this will usually be because you have set environment variables for dynamic library search which are picking up another copy of the FFmpeg library. Either set the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to pick up the FFmpeg library you downloaded, or remove them. You can adjust standard environment variables in your .profile or shell environment, or via a property list in ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist .

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Why do I receive an error when I export to an FFmpeg format?

If you receive a "cannot find audio codec" error when exporting to an FFmpeg format, the FFmpeg library you are linking to does not support this codec. To export to this format, you will need a build of the FFmpeg library that supports this codec. Distributable libraries will not include support for AMR WB (wide band), due to licensing issues. Exporting to AMR WB will return the error "FFmpeg cannot find audio codec 0x 12001". To obtain AMR WB export support, you could build FFmpeg yourself from source and enable the relevant library in the configure step.

VST plug-ins
First, download and unzip the VST Enabler. http://audacityteam.org/vst/ Place the unzipped VST Enabler, along with your VST plug-ins, into the Plugins folder in the Audacity installation folder. (On Mac OS X, this is usually in the Applications folder. On Windows, it is usually under Program Files.) The next time you start Audacity, your VST effects will appear at the bottom of the Effect menu.

Why do some VST plug-ins look wrong, or not work?

The VST Enabler. is not yet able to display custom interfaces for plug-ins. Instead, it uses generic controls for all VST plug-ins. Because of this, many plugins will look or act differently than they do in other programs. Other VST plug-ins may not work at all, because of bugs in the VST Enabler. You can contact us to report plug-ins that do not work. Audacity also does not support VST instrument (VSTi) plug-ins.

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3
Menus
Menus enable you to run Audacity on your computer. The basic menu bar will look like following when you start Audacity :

Dropdown for the selections take you to the operation that you will want to conduct. The File menu for example gives the following dropdown :

FILE MENU New.

Creates a new empty project window.
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Open...
Selecting Open presents you with a dialog where you can choose a file to open. If the current project window is empty, the new file will take over the current window, otherwise a new project window will be opened. The file formats recognized by Audacity are WAV, AIFF, NeXT/AU, IRCAM, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, MIDI, and the Audacity Project file format (AUP). In addition, Audacity can also attempt to open an audio file in a different format, as long as it is uncompressed - to do this, use the Import Raw Data command.

Close
Closes the current project window.

Save Project
Saves the current Audacity project (AUP) file. Audacity projects are not intended to be read by other programs, but they are extremely fast to load and save within Audacity. When you are finished working on a project and you want to be able to use it in another program, select one of the Export commands instead. Note that most of the audio data for an Audacity project is not stored in the AUP file, but in a directory (folder) with the same name as the project. For example, if you save a project as chanson.aup, there will be a directory called chanson_data created to store the actual audio tracks of the project.

Save Project As...

Saves the current Audacity project (AUP) file, allowing you to give it a different name or move it to a new location if you have already saved it in one location. Audacity projects are not intended to be read by other programs, but they are extremely fast to load and save within Audacity. When you are finished working on a project and you want to be able to use it in another program, select one of the Export commands instead.
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Export As WAV...
Exports the current Audacity project as a standard audio file format such as WAV or AIFF. You can change the format of exported files in the Preferences dialog. If there are multiple tracks in your project, they will be automatically mixed in the exported data. For more information about mixing, see Quick Mix. To export only a single track or part of a track, use Export Selection.

Export Selection As WAV...

This is the same as Export, but it only exports the part of the project that is selected. This is very useful if you want to save a small clip from part of a track as a separate file.

Export As MP3...
Exports the current Audacity project as an MP3 file. Audacity does not encode MP3 files directly, but instead requires that you download a separate MP3 encoder. To export only a single track or part of track, use Export Selection as MP3.

Export Selection As MP3...

This is the same as Export MP3, but it only exports the part of the project that is selected. This is very useful if you want to save a small clip from part of a track as a separate file. See Exporting MP3 Files.

Export As OGG...
Exports the current Audacity project as an Ogg Vorbis file. To export only a single track or part of track, use Export Selection as Ogg.
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Export Selection As OGG...

This is the same as Export As OGG, but it only exports the part of the project that is selected. This is very useful if you want to save a small clip from part of a track as a separate file.

Export Labels...
If you have any Label Tracks, this command will export them as a text file. This feature is commonly used in Speech Recognition research to annotate a speech utterance and export the annotation to be later processed by another program. To import these labels into a different project later, use the Import Labels command.

Export Multiple...
This allows you to do multiple exports from audacity with one command based either on multiple tracks in the project or labels in a single audio track. It's great for splitting up long recordings into CD tracks

Preferences
Opens a dialog window that lets you configure Audacity.

Exit/Quit
Closes all project windows and exits Audacity. It will ask you if you want to save changes to your project. It is not necessary for you to save changes if you just exported your file as WAV or MP3 and you are finished working with it. On the other hand, if you are working on a mix and plan to continue where you left off, saving an Audacity Project will let you restore everything as it is later.

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Edit Menu

Undo
This will undo the last editing operation you performed to your project. Audacity currently supports full unlimited undo - meaning you can undo every editing operation back to when you opened the window.

Redo
This will redo any editing operations that were just undone. After you perform a new editing operation, you can no longer redo the operations that were undone.

Cut
Removes the selected audio data and places it on the clipboard. Only one "thing" can be on the clipboard at a time, but it may contain multiple tracks.

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Delete
Removes the audio data that is currently selected without copying it to the clipboard.

Silence
Erases the audio data currently selected, replacing it with silence instead of removing it completely.

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Copy
Copies the selected audio data to the clipboard without removing it from the project.

Paste
Inserts whatever is on the clipboard at the position of the selection cursor in the project, replacing whatever audio data is currently selected, if any.

Trim
Deletes everything but the selection.

Split
Moves the selected region into its own track or tracks, replacing the affected portion of the original track with silence. See the figure below:

Duplicate
Makes a copy of all or part of a track or set of tracks into new tracks. See the figure below:

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Selection Save
Saves the current selection and position. This function only saves the selection boundaries, but not the actual audio data.

Selection Restore
Restores the selection to the project. You need to have an existing selection for this to work.

Move Cursor...
These commands provide quick and accurate ways to manoeuvre the cursor around the project to the start and end of tracks and selections.

Snap-To...
Turns snapping of the cursor to a grid of time values on or off. When off, your cursor can be positioned on any sample in the audio file. When on, it is restricted to certain points in time, determined by the time format in use. This is useful if your project must follow an external timecode exactly.

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View Menu

Zoom In
Zooms in on the horizontal axis of the audio, displaying more detail about less time. You can also use the zoom tool to zoom in on a particular part of the window.

Zoom Normal
Zooms to the default view, which displays about one inch per second.

Zoom Out
Zooms out, displaying less detail about more time.

Fit in Window
Zooms out until the entire project just fits in the window.

Fit Vertically
Adjusts the height of all the tracks until they fit in the project window.
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Zoom to Selection
Zooms in until the selected audio fills the width of the screen to show the selection in more detail.

Set Selection Format

Sets the format in which selections are measured in at the bottom of the application window. Combined with setting Set Snap-To Mode to ON, this is ideal to cut stuff up in to exact measures.

History
Brings up the history window. It shows all the actions you have performed during the current session, including importing. The right-hand column shows the amount of HD space your operations used. You can jump back and forth between editing steps quite easily by simply clicking on the entries in the window. The history window can be kept open at all times. It doesn't interfere with any other operations.

Plot Spectrum
To use this feature, first select a region of audio from a single track, then select "Plot Spectrum". It opens up a window which displays the Power Spectrum of the audio over that region, calculated using the Fast Fourier Transform. The graph represents how much energy is in each frequency. This window can also display other common functions that are calculated using the Fast Fourier Transform, including three versions of the Autocorrelation function. The Enhanced Autocorrelation function is very good at identifying the pitch of a note.

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Float or Dock Control Toolbar

Toggles between displaying the tool docked at the top of each project window, or in a separate floating window. You can also float any toolbar by grabbing the handle on the left side and dragging it to the location you want. Once they are floating these options change to docking the toolbars back into the main window. Float or Dock Menu Toolbar Float or Dock Mixer Toolbar Float or Dock Meter Toolbar

Do the same thing for the other toolbars

Project Menu

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Import Audio...
This command is used to import audio from a standard audio format into your project. Use this command if you already have a couple of tracks, and you want to add another track to the same project, maybe to mix them together. Use this command to import anything except MIDI files. You cannot yet use this option to import Audacity Projects.

Import Labels...
This command takes a text file which contains time codes and labels, and turns them into a Label Track.

Import MIDI...
This menu command imports MIDI files and puts them into a Note Track. Audacity can display MIDI files, but cannot play, edit, or save them yet.

Import Raw Data...

This menu command allows you to open a file in virtually any format, as long as it is not compressed. When you select the file, Audacity will look through it and try to guess its format. It will guess correctly about 90% of the time, so you can try just pressing "OK" and listening to it. If it is not correct, however, you can use the dialog presented to try all of the different possibilities. At the beginning of your imported track(s), you may notice a little bit of noise. This is probably the file's header, which Audacity was not able to parse. Just zoom in and select the noise with the Selection Tool, and then choose Delete.

Edit ID3 Tags...

Opens a dialog allowing you to edit the ID3 tags associated with a project, for MP3 exporting. ID3 Tags are used to store the Title, Artist, Author, and other information in MP3 files. When you import an MP3 file, Audacity remembers this information and
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stores it with your project. When you export an MP3 file, Audacity will prompt you for the ID3 tags, showing you any tags it collected from an original MP3 file, or that you typed by selecting "Edit ID3 Tags" from the Project menu. Audacity allows you to store ID3 tags in either the ID3v1 or the ID3v2 format. In general, you should use the ID3v2 format, because ID3v2 tags go at the beginning of an MP3 file, whereas ID3v1 tags go at the end. Having the title and author first means that someone downloading an MP3 you created will know that information before they've finished downloading the song

Quick Mix
This command mixes all of the selected tracks down to one or two tracks. The channel of a track being mixed affects whether it will be mixed into the left channel of the resulting track(s), the right channel, or both (mono). For example, if you have four tracks:

Track 1: left channel Track 2: left channel Track 3: right channel Track 4: mono channel

and you select them all and perform a Quick Mix, you will end up with two tracks: the first will contain a mix of tracks 1, 2, and 4 (the new left channel) and the other will contain a mix of tracks 3 and 4 (the new right channel). Your tracks are implicitly mixed whenever you hit the Play button and whenever you select Export. Note that if you try to mix two very loud tracks together, you may get clipping (it will sound like pops, clicks, and noise). To avoid this, you should use the track gain controls to reduce the amplitude of all of your tracks.

New Audio Track

This creates a new empty audio track. This command is rarely needed, since importing, recording, and mixing automatically create new tracks as needed. But
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you can use this to cut or copy data from an existing track and paste it into a blank track.

New Stereo Track

Creates a stereo version of the new audio track above. You may need this if you start with a load of mono tracks and want to export a stereo mix.

New Label Track

This creates a new Label track, which can be very useful for textual annotation. See the discussion on Label tracks for more information on how to use label tracks.

New Time Track

Creates a special track that can be used to speed up and slow down playback over the course of the project. This affects all tracks in the project.

Remove Track(s)
This command removes the selected track or tracks from the project. Even if only part of a track is selected, the entire track is removed. You can also delete a track by clicking the X in its upper-left corner. To cut out only part of the audio in a track, use Delete or Silence.

Align functions
All the align functions work on whole tracks or groups of tracks, NOT on selections, even if they span across multiple tracks. Please read the tutorial on how to use the align functions. You will also find some creative uses and solutions to common problems there. These functions operate on each track individually. If more than one track is selected, these functions do not preserve their position to one another
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Align with Zero

Aligns the start of any selected tracks to the start of the project.

Align with Cursor

Aligns the start of any selected tracks to the cursor position.

Align with Selection Start

Aligns the start of any selected tracks to the start of the current selection

Align with Selection End

Aligns the start of any selected tracks to the end of the current selection

Align End with Cursor

Aligns the end of any selected tracks to the cursor position.

Align End with Selection Start

Aligns the end of any selected tracks to the start of the current selection

Align End with Selection End

Aligns the end of any selected tracks to the end of the current selection

Align Tracks Together

If you select multiple tracks, this command adjusts their time offset so that they start at the same time. It adjusts their starting time to the average of all of the tracks' original starting times. To adjust the time offset of one track, use the Time Shift tool.
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Align and Move Cursor

These commands work just like the align commands with the move cursor command immediately following it.

Add Label at Selection

This menu item lets you create a new label at the current selection. You can title the label by typing with the keyboard and then hitting "Enter" when you're done. The label saves your current selection - so when you click on the label later it will return the selection to the state it was in when you created the label. See the discussion on Label Tracks for more information on how to use label tracks.

Add Label at Selection

Like Add Label at Selection but the label is added at the current position during playback

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Generate Menu

Silence
Inserts silence. The length is determined by the length of your selection and the position by the left boundary of your selection. If no selection is made, the default length inserted at the cursor position is 30 seconds. For example, to insert a two seconds of silence at a certain point, place the cursor at your chosen spot, hold the SHIFT key down, click and drag your mouse to the right to mark roughly two seconds, release the mouse button and activate the Silence function in the Generate menu. Silence, the length of your selection, will be inserted at the left boundary of your selection.

White Noise
Inserts white noise. The length is determined by the length of your selection and the position by the left boundary of your selection. If no selection is made, the default length inserted at the cursor position is 30 seconds.

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Tone
Inserts a wave of chosen type, frequency and amplitude. The length is determined by the length of your selection and the position by the left boundary of your selection. If no selection is made, the default length inserted at the cursor position is 30 seconds. Parameters: Waveform Sine, Square, Sawtooth Frequency(Hz) 1-20000 (value below 1.0 and above 20000 will be corrected to 1.0 and 20000!) Amplitude 0-1 - This is the volume of the generated wave.

Pluck
Inserts a synthesized pluck tone. The length is determined by the length of your selection and the position by the left boundary of your selection. If no selection is made, the default length inserted at the cursor position is one second. Pitch 0-127 The number corresponds to the value of a midi note, which is assigned to a pitch. The higher the number, the higher the note.

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Effects Menu

Audacity includes many built-in effects and also lets you use a wide range of plug-in effects. You can download many free plugins for Audacity at the Website http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/plugins. Loads of information is also available at http://www.kvr-vst.com. To apply an effect, simply select part or all of the tracks you want to modify, and select the effect from the menu. Titles which end in an ellipsis (...) will bring up a dialog asking you for more parameters. There are four classes of effects and they are all applied the same way. These are
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Internal Effects, VST Effect Plugins(Windows/Mac only), Nyquist Effects and LADSPA Effects

Internal Effects Amplify...

This effect increases or decreases the volume of a track or set of tracks. When you open the dialog, Audacity automatically calculates the maximum amount you could amplify the selected audio without causing clipping (from being too loud).

Bass Boost...
This is a safe, smooth filter which can amplify the lower frequencies while leaving most of the other frequencies alone. It is most effective if you don't try to boost too much; 12 dB is usually just right.

Echo...
A simple delay line. This effect repeats the audio you have selected again and again, softer each time. There is a fixed time delay between each repeat. First select the audio you want to apply the effect to. You may want to first add silence to the end of your track(s) so that the echo has plenty of time to die out. When you select "Echo..." from the Effect menu, Audacity will ask you for two numbers. The first number is the amount of delay between the echos, in seconds. The second value is the decay factor, which is a number between 0 and 1. A decay factor of 0 means no echo, and a decay factor of 1 means that each echo is just as loud as the original. A value of 0.5 means that its amplitude is cut in half each time, so it dies out slowly. Smaller values will make it die out even more quickly.
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The Echo effect is very simple and is not intended to be used in place of a Reverb effect, which simulates the sound of a room, concert hall, stage, or other natural environment. Audacity for MacOS and Windows comes with Gverb, a free LASPA Reverb plug-in. Note that if you set the decay value to 1.0, you can use Echo to create loops that repeat as long as you want any never change volume.

Fade In
Applies a linear fade-in to the selected audio. For a logarithmic fade, use the envelope tool.

Fade Out
Applies a linear fade-out to the selected audio. For a logarithmic fade, use the envelope tool.

FFT Filter...
This is the most general type of filter. You define a curve that shows how much louder or quieter each frequency in the signal should be made. If you're careful, you can use it to highlight exactly the frequencies you want. However, doing an FFT filter is more likely to result in artifacts, especially if the filter you draw is not smooth.

Invert
This effect flips the audio samples upside-down. This normally does not affect the sound of the audio at all. It is occasionally useful, for example when the left and right channels of a song both contain equal amounts of vocals, but unequal amounts of background instruments. By inverting one of the channels and not the other, the vocals will cancel each other out, leaving just the instrumentals. Obviously this only works if the exact same vocal signal is present in both of the channels to begin with.

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Noise Removal...
This effect is ideal for removing constant background noise such as fans, tape noise, or hums. It will not work very well for removing talking or music in the background. Removing noise is a two-step process. In the first step, you select a portion of your sound which contains all noise and no signal, in other words, select the part that's silent except for the noise. Then choose Noise Removal... from the Effect menu and click Get Profile. Audacity learns from this selection what the noise sounds like, so it knows what to filter out later. Then, select all of the audio where you want the noise removed from and choose Noise Removal... again. This time, click the "Remove Noise" button. It may take a few seconds or longer depending on how much you selected. If too much or not enough noise was removed, you can Undo (from the Edit menu) and try Noise Removal... again with a different noise removal level. You don't have to get a new noise profile again if you think the first one was fine. Removing noise usually results in some distortion. This is normal and there's virtually nothing you can do about it. When there's only a little bit of noise, and the signal (i.e. the voice or the music or whatever) is much louder than the noise, this effect works well and there's very little audible distortion. But when the noise is very loud, when the noise is variable, or when the signal is not much louder than the noise, then the result is often too distorted.

Phaser...
The name "Phaser" comes from "Phase Shifter", because it works by combining phase-shifted signals with the original signal. The movement of the phase-shifted signals is controlled using a Low Frequency Oscillator (LFO).

Reverse
This effect reverses the selected audio temporally; after the effect the end of the audio will be heard first and the beginning last. Some people reverse small portions of audio to make inappropriate language unintelligible, while others
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believe you can hear subliminal messages if you listen to speech backwards. You can also create interesting sound effects by recording natural events and reversing the audio.

Wahwah...
Just like that guitar sound so popular in the 1970's. This effect uses a moving bandpass filter to create its sound. A low frequency oscillator (LFO) is used to control the movement of the filter throughout the frequency spectrum. The WahWah effect automatically adjusts the phase of the left and right channels when given a stereo recording, so that the effect seems to travel across the speakers

VST Plug-ins
To use a VST plug-in effect, put the effect in the directory (folder) called "PlugIns", which should be in the same directory where Audacity resides. If there is no directory, create one. You will also need to download and unzip the VST Enabler to the same directory. The next time you launch Audacity, any plug-ins you added will appear in the Effect menu.

Freeverb2...
Audacity for Mac OS and Windows comes with a VST plug-in called Freeverb, which is in version 2 (hence "Freeverb2"). This effect implements a versatile and high-quality reverb effect. Getting a good reverb sound depends a lot on the source audio and can take a lot of experimentation. One good strategy is to select a small portion of audio (a few seconds) and try to add reverb. Listen to it, then Undo and try it again with different settings. Keep doing this until you've found the settings you like the sound of best, and then Undo one last time, Select All, then apply the effect to your entire recording.
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There are a lot of parameters to Freeverb2: Room size, Damping, Predelay, Lowpass, Highpass, Wet level, and Dry level. Let's start with the wet and dry levels. Freeverb works by taking your audio signal and modifying it to create the reverberated sound, i.e. the sound you hear echoing off the walls of the room. This is called the "wet" part of the effect. This is mixed together with the original sound, which is called the "dry" part of the effect, to produce the combination of direct (unreverberated) and indirect (reverberated) sound, which is what you would naturally hear. If you set the dry level to -infinity and the wet level to 0 dB, the result is something like standing outside of a concert hall: you can only hear the reverberated sound. If you set the dry level to 0 and the wet level to -infinity, it's like standing right in front of the singer in a tiny room - all you can hear is the singer, and no reverb. A good place to start is to set both the dry level and wet level to 0 dB. However, you may want to experiment with lowering the dry level while you are experimenting with the sound of the reverb. The room size parameter is self-explanatory. The smallest room size setting creates a quick, bright reverb, while the largest setting creates a long, drawn-out, and dark reverb. The damping parameter controls how the sound bounces off the walls - i.e. if it is mostly reflected or absorbed. The predelay controls the delay between the dry signal (unreverberated) and the wet signal (reverberated) - usually there is some predelay because of the time it takes sound waves to travel from the sound source to the nearest wall, and to the microphone. Larger predelays are suitable for creating an effect of a larger room. Finally, the lowpass and highpass filters can be used to make the reverberated sound lower or higher. Increasing the lowpass filter filters out the high frequencies, and similarly increasing the highpass filter filters out the low frequencies.

Nyquist Plugins
To use a Nyquist effect, put the effect in the directory (folder) called "Plug-Ins", which should be in the same directory where Audacity resides. Upon installation,
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some nyquist scripts are included, so you needn't worry about creating this directory. The next time you launch Audacity, any plug-ins you added will appear in the Effect, Generate or Analyse menus.

LADSPA Plugins
These started out a a plugin format for Linux, but can now be used on Windows and OS X as well. There are lots of free plugins available, and no enabler is needed. More information can be found on the web. http://www.ladspa.org/

Analyze Menu

Note: plugins that accept input but produce no output will be placed in the Analyze menu. By default, this menu is often empty

Sample Analyze Nyquist Plugin ...

Will place labels that mark the beginning and end of a selection

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4
Tracks
Audio Tracks
Audio tracks contain digitally sampled sounds. In Audacity, a channels of sound is represented by one mono audio track, a two channel sound by one stereo audio track. Each audio track has a sample rate: common values include 8000 (telephone), 16000 (speech), 22050 (many games of recent years), 44100 (CD Audio), and 48000 (DAT). From Audacity 1.2 on, you can specify a different sample rate for each track. You can import audio of any sample rate or bit depth and Audacity will resample and convert it to the project rate and bit depth on the fly, as well as upon Export. You can choose different sample rate conversion qualities for playback and Exporting.

Label Tracks
Label Tracks can be used to annotate an audio file. They can be used for lyrics, markers, or notes, and they can even be used to save selections.
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To create a Label Track, select New Label Track from the Project Menu. Alternatively, simply click or select where you would like to place a label, and choose Add Label at Selection from the Project Menu, and a Label Track will be created automatically if one doesn't already exist. To add a new label, click or select where you want the new label to appear, then select Add Label at Selection from the Project Menu, then type the name of the label, and finally press Enter or click outside of the label.

To edit the name of a label, click anywhere in it. Zoom in first if there are too many labels crowded together and you are unable to click on the one you want. When a label is selected for editing, it looks like the first label below: When editing the name of a label, you are limited to using just the backspace key for editing. There is no way to move the insertion point to append a letter to the beginning of a label. Once a label is selected, you can move to the next label by pressing Tab, and move to the previous label by pressing Shift-Tab.

To delete a label or multiple labels, select the area containing the label flags you wish to delete, and choose Silence from the Edit Menu. Alternatively you can delete an individual label by clicking on it and pressing Backspace until you have deleted all of the characters in the label, then pressing Enter.

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To move labels, use the normal editing commands like Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete, and Silence. You can save a selection in a label. When you create a new label, the left selection edge determines the position of the label's flag. However, the right selection edge is also stored in the label, and when you click on it, the full original selection will be restored. If you wish to apply this selection to only a subset of the tracks, shift-click in the label area to the left of each track's waveform to change whether each track is part of the selection or not.

Exporting and Importing label tracks

Label Tracks are saved when you save an Audacity Project, so if you just want to continue using the labels along with the same file, just save a project. But you can also export the labels to a simple text file, and import them. This allows you to save information about the locations of events in an audio file for use in another program, and also provides a way to mass-edit the labels if necessary. To export a Label Track, choose Export Labels... from the File Menu. The exported file will contain one line per label, starting with the time offset in seconds, then a tab, and then the name of the label, for example :
1.217995 3.921073 7.584454 11.070002 Bass intro Guitar enters Drums enter Chorus

To import a Label Track, choose Import Labels... from the File Menu

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Time Tracks
This track consists of a single envelope.

It controls the playback speed within a given range, i.e. it facilitates envelopebased resampling. The envelope handing is exactly the same as for the volume envelope. Clicking on the track panel reveals a few options, similar to the ones of the track panel of an audio track. "Set Range" lets you set the minimum and maximum pitch change. It is expressed in percentage values relative to 100%. Start by choosing New Time Track from the Project Menu. Then change the range of time warping by clicking on the Track Pop-Down Menu and choosing Set Range (an option which only appears for Time Tracks) The converter used will be the one(s) set up on the Quality tab of the Preferences. You can make separate choices for Realtime (playback) and High Quality (exporting), trading speed against quality. Older computers may be incapable of playing audio in real-time that makes use of a Time Track, however you can always Export the file as a WAV and then playback the WAV file later.
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To edit the time warping, choose the envelope tool from the Control Toolbar - the same tool you use to edit amplitude envelopes in Audio Tracks. Click to create and edit control points. Drag points off the track to delete them. The Time Track has a ruler. As you edit the warping, the ruler will warp to show

Audio Track Controls Track Delete Button

Clicking on this button deletes the track. This action is undoable.

Vertical Track Resizing

For horizontal resizing, which is called zooming, visit the View Menu page. Vertically resizing a track is fairly simple.

Click and hold the mouse button on the resizing handle (see figure), move mouse up or down until the track has the wanted vertical size release mouse button

Note: Stereo tracks have two resize handles. The one beneath the upper track lets you resize both tracks in relation to one another. The resize handle beneath the lower track resizes both tracks equally the same way. It changes the overall vertical size of the whole stereo track.
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Track Solo Button

Clicking on this button will switch this track to solo mode. This action is not reversible with the Undo function, but you can un-solo a track simply by clicking it again. In solo mode, only tracks that have the solo button activated (turning the button red), will be played. To deactivate the solo mode for that track, click on the button again. (button turns grey again) The state of the solo buttons is NOT saved in the project file, and it does not affect Exporting or Mixing.

Track Mute Button

Clicking on this button will mute this track , i.e. this track is switched off without deleting it. This action is not reversible with the Undo function, however you can unmute a track just by clicking the mute button again. Muted tracks are easy to spot, because their Mute buttons are green. To unmute the track, click on the button again. (button turns grey again) The state of the mute buttons is NOT saved in the project file, and it does not affect mixing (i.e. muted tracks are still mixed when you export or Quick Mix).

Gain and Panning Controls

Gain (Volume) This slider controls the track volume, or rather the overall gain of that particular track. It's default position is in the middle, as shown in the picture to the left. This setting represents 0 dB.

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Tip: Normally the control moves in increments of 3 dB. Hold down Shift to adjust by 1 dB at a time. Pan This slider set the panning position of the track in the stereo field. It's default position is in the middle, as shown in the picture to the left. Tip: Normally the control moves in increments of 10%. Hold down Shift for finer control.

Selecting
Selecting can be done with the keyboard, the mouse or by combining the keyboard and mouse. You need to have the Selection Tool activated for making a selection.

The exception is selecting the entire track by clicking on the track panel. The align functions all still work the same way no matter which tool is activated. However, making selections and placing the cursor still requires the Selection Tool. The selection modifier key is SHIFT. In a word processor or text editor, the SHIFT key is the modifier to turn any character that you enter via the keyboard in to an UPPERCASE character. In Audacity and most audio editing applications, holding down the SHIFT key means that any cursor movement or placement will result in a selection.

What follows are ways of making selections.

How do I select audio on one track ?

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Place the cursor on the waveform of a track, hold down the mouse button, drag the mouse and release the mouse button. You can select audio with the keyboard as well, but may need to place the cursor with the mouse first. You need to hold down the SHIFT key and use the left/right cursor keys to expand the selection. Combine the former with the CTRL key (STRG on the German keyboard) to shrink the selection. How do I expand/shrink my selection ? Hold the SHIFT key, then click and hold the mouse button. If you clicked to the left of the center of the current selection, you will now be able to move the left selection boundary with your mouse. The same goes for the right hand side of the selection center. Release the mouse button when you are satisfied. You can use the cursor keys as well. It works the same way as described in the previous item. How do I select from the cursor to the start of the track ? Use the Start to Cursor function in the Edit menu. How do I select from the cursor to the end of the track ? Use the Cursor to End function in the Edit menu. How do I select from the cursor to the start of the project ? Hold the SHIFT key and click on the Skip to Start button. How do I select from the cursor to the end of the project ? Hold the SHIFT key and click on the Skip to End button. How do I select all the audio of a track ? Click on the track panel. The resulting selection will be confined to the contents of that track.

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How do I select all the audio of two or more tracks ? It cannot be done precisely right now, if one track isn't within the range of the other. It actually doesn't have to be, because of the group functions in the Align menu, but more of that later. If the start and end of one track is within the start and end of the other, simply select the longer track, then SHIFT + click the second track panel. If the start and end of one track is not within the start and end of the other, select the one track, then expand the selection by SHIFT + clicking in to the second track until the selection encompasses all the desired material. How do I select all the audio of the project ? Use the Select All function in the Edit menu, or hit CTRL+A.

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5
Basics
What is sound?
Sounds are pressure waves of air. If there wasn't any air, we wouldn't be able to hear sounds. There's no sound in space. We hear sounds because our ears are sensitive to these pressure waves. Perhaps the easiest type of sound wave to understand is a short, sudden event like a clap. When you clap your hands, the air that was between your hands is pushed aside. This increases the air pressure in the space near your hands, because more air molecules are temporarily compressed into less space. The high pressure pushes the air molecules outwards in all directions at the speed of sound, which is about 340 meters per second. When the pressure wave reaches your ear, it pushes on your eardrum slightly, causing you to hear the clap.

A hand clap is a short event that causes a single pressure wave that quickly dies out. The image above shows the waveform for a typical hand clap. In the waveform, the horizontal axis represents time, and the vertical axis is for pressure.
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The initial high pressure is followed by low pressure, but the oscillation quickly dies out. The other common type of sound wave is a periodic wave. When you ring a bell, after the initial strike (which is a little like a hand clap), the sound comes from the vibration of the bell. While the bell is still ringing, it vibrates at a particular frequency, depending on the size and shape of the bell, and this causes the nearby air to vibrate with the same frequency. This causes pressure waves of air to travel outwards from the bell, again at the speed of sound. Pressure waves from continuous vibration look more like this:

How is sound recorded?

A microphone consists of a small membrane that is free to vibrate, along with a mechanism that translates movements of the membrane into electrical signals. (The exact electrical mechanism varies depending on the type of microphone.) So acoustical waves are translated into electrical waves by the microphone. Typically, higher pressure corresponds to higher voltage, and vice versa. A tape recorder translates the waveform yet again - this time from an electrical signal on a wire, to a magnetic signal on a tape. When you play a tape, the process gets performed in reverse, with the magnetic signal transforming into an electrical signal, and the electrical signal causing a speaker to vibrate, usually using an electromagnet.
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How is sound recorded digitally ?

Recording onto a tape is an example of analog recording. Audacity deals with digital recordings - recordings that have been sampled so that they can be used by a digital computer, like the one you're using now. Digital recording has a lot of benefits over analog recording. Digital files can be copied as many times as you want, with no loss in quality, and they can be burned to an audio CD or shared via the Internet. Digital audio files can also be edited much more easily than analog tapes. The main device used in digital recording is a Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC). The ADC captures a snapshot of the electric voltage on an audio line and represents it as a digital number that can be sent to a computer. By capturing the voltage thousands of times per second, you can get a very good approximation to the original audio signal:

Each dot in the figure above represents one audio sample. There are two factors that determine the quality of a digital recording:

Sample rate: The rate at which the samples are captured or played back, measured in Hertz (Hz), or samples per second. An audio CD has a sample rate of 44,100 Hz, often written as 44 KHz for short. This is also the default sample rate that Audacity uses, because audio CDs are so prevalent. Sample format or sample size: Essentially this is the number of digits in the digital representation of each sample. Think of the sample rate as the horizontal precision of the digital waveform, and the sample format as the vertical precision. An audio CD has a precision of 16 bits, which corresponds to about 5 decimal digits.

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Higher sampling rates allow a digital recording to accurately record higher frequencies of sound. The sampling rate should be at least twice the highest frequency you want to represent. Humans can't hear frequencies above about 20,000 Hz, so 44,100 Hz was chosen as the rate for audio CDs to just include all human frequencies. Sample rates of 96 and 192 KHz are starting to become more common, particularly in DVD-Audio, but many people honestly can't hear the difference. Higher sample sizes allow for more dynamic range - louder louds and softer softs. If you are familiar with the decibel (dB) scale, the dynamic range on an audio CD is theoretically about 90 dB, but realistically signals that are -24 dB or more in volume are greatly reduced in quality. Audacity supports two additional sample sizes: 24-bit, which is commonly used in digital recording, and 32-bit float, which has almost infinite dynamic range, and only takes up twice as much storage as 16bit samples. Playback of digital audio uses a Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC). This takes the sample and sets a certain voltage on the analog outputs to recreate the signal, that the Analog-to-Digital Converter originally took to create the sample. The DAC does this as faithfully as possible and the first CD players did only that, which didn't sound good at all. Nowadays DACs use Oversampling to smooth out the audio signal. The quality of the filters in the DAC also contribute to the quality of the recreated analog audio signal. The filter is part of a multitude of stages that make up a DAC.

How does audio get digitized on your computer?

Your computer has a soundcard - it could be a separate card, like a SoundBlaster, or it could be built-in to your computer. Either way, your soundcard comes with an Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) for recording, and a Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) for playing audio. Your operating system (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, etc.) talks to the sound card to actually handle the recording and playback, and Audacity talks to your operating system so that you can capture sounds to a file, edit them, and mix multiple tracks while playing.

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Standard file formats for PCM audio

There are two main types of audio files on a computer:

PCM stands for Pulse Code Modulation. This is just a fancy name for the technique described above, where each number in the digital audio file represents exactly one sample in the waveform. Common examples of PCM files are WAV files, AIFF files, and Sound Designer II files. Audacity supports WAV, AIFF, and many other PCM files. The other type is compressed files. Earlier formats used logarithmic encodings to squeeze more dynamic range out of fewer bits for each sample, like the u-law or a-law encoding in the Sun AU format. Modern compressed audio files use sophisticated psychoacoustics algorithms to represent the essential frequencies of the audio signal in far less space. Examples include MP3 (MPEG I, layer 3), Ogg Vorbis, and WMA (Windows Media Audio). Audacity supports MP3 and Ogg Vorbis, but not the proprietary WMA format or the MPEG4 format (AAC) used by Apple's iTunes.

For details on the audio formats Audacity can import from and export to, please check out the Fileformats page of this documentation. Please remember that MP3 does not store uncompressed PCM audio data. When you create an MP3 file, you are deliberately losing some quality in order to use less disk space.

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6
Opening and Saving Files
Audacity project files are saved in a special format that only Audacity can open. To use an Audacity project in another program or burn it to CD, first open the AUP file in Audacity (if you saved it recently it will be in the File > Recent Files menu). Then use the Export commands in the File menu to save the audio in a standard format like WAV or AIFF which may be used by other programs.

Audacity Project Files

Audacity breaks long tracks into small pieces so it can edit them more efficiently. When you save an AUP project file, Audacity stores all the pieces in a _data folder that has the same name as the AUP file. For example, "song.aup" will open the pieces inside the "song_data" folder. You should not edit the .au files yourself nor move or rename the _data folder. Open the AUP file and Audacity will load the .au files in the correct sequence automatically.

WMA, AAC, FLAC Files

Audacity cannot import or export files in WMA, AAC, RealAudio, Shorten (SHN), or most other proprietary formats, or any kind of Digital Rights Management (DRM) protected file, including many purchased online such as on iTunes or Napster. Because of licensing and patent restrictions, we are not allowed to add these formats to Audacity. Future versions of Audacity might be able to support these formats using codecs installed in your operating system.
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Some open formats are not yet supported by Audacity, including Ogg, Speex and FLAC. We hope to support these formats in future versions of Audacity. Audacity can currently import WAV, AIFF, AU, MP2/MP3 and OGG Vorbis files. If you cannot import your file into Audacity, you can as a workround convert it to WAV or AIFF. As long as it is not a DRM-protected file, you could do this with iTunes or with SUPER player. If it is a DRM-protected file, you can burn it to an audio CD in the application that is licensed to play it, then extract (rip) the CD track to WAV or AIFF. On Windows, you can use Windows Media Player 11, iTunes, or CDex to extract to WAV. Or you can play the file on your computer and record it .

MIDI files
Audacity cannot play, edit, or convert MIDI files. It can only display them visually (for comparison with recorded sounds). Audacity is focused on sampled audio (like WAV files).

Track from an audio CD

Audacity cannot import a track directly from an audio CD. You must use a separate program like CDex or iTunes to extract CD tracks into a format that Audacity can read, like WAV or AIFF. On Mac OS X computers, CD tracks appear in Finder as AIFF files so can be imported directly into Audacity.

Saving recording on an audio CD

After making a recording or editing a file in Audacity, follow these steps to save your work on an audio CD: 1. Use the WAV or AIFF options in the File Export Dialog's "Save as type" dropdown menu to save your Audacity recording in a sound file. 2. Use any CD-recording software (iTunes or Nero, for example) to burn this file to a CD.

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To make a disc you can play in normal CD players, make sure to create a music or audio CD (not a data CD). Use CD-R discs, because some players cannot read CD-RW. You can burn only 74 (or 80 depending on the CD-R) minutes or so onto an audio CD this is a limitation of the audio CD format. Some CD software will burn only 16-bit, 44.1KHz stereo sound files. If your CD recording software won't open your sound file, export the file again after choosing the following settings in Audacity: 1. At the bottom of the Audacity window, set the Project Rate to 44100 Hz. 2. If your project does not already contain a stereo track, choose New Stereo Track from the Project menu. (This will make Audacity export your recording as a stereo file.)

Splitting a long recording into multiple files or CD tracks

Follow these steps to create a separate file for each song or segment of a long recording. This is particularly useful if you are creating a CD, since each file will appear as a separate track on the CD. 1. Click to place the cursor at the start of the first song. 2. Choose Add Label at Selection from the Project menu. If you wish, you can type the name of the song. 3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 for each song. 4. When you are finished, choose Export Multiple from the File menu. When you click the Export button, Audacity will save each song as a separate file, using the format and location you choose.

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7
Editing an Existing File
The easiest way to use Audacity is to open up an existing audio file and make small changes. If you've never used Audacity before, this is a great place to start.

Objective
The objective of this tutorial is to learn how to edit a sound file. To achieve this objective, we are going to open an existing sound file, remove all but 10 seconds of this file, apply a 1-second fade-out at the end, export the results, and play it in your favorite audio player. These steps will introduce the basic steps commonly used when editing a file.

Step 1: Find a file to edit

Audacity can open many common audio file formats, including WAV, AIFF, and MP3. If the optional ffmpeg library is installed, a larger range of formats, including WMA and the audio content of most video files, can be opened. Audacity cannot open copy-protected music files. If you want to edit music that you have on an audio CD, you need to "rip" the music into an audio file. See the Audio CDs page for information on getting the audio off of CDs and into Audacity. Don't have any audio files handy? There's lots of free music online! Here's one site where you can download free music: Opsound The recordings on this site are free, distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license, which gives you the right to create a derivative work without paying royalties, as long as you give credit and make your
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derivative work free, too. This is similar to the license for Audacity, which allows any programmer to modify it and redistribute it for free.

Step 2: Open the file with Audacity

Open Audacity. To open an audio file, you can select "Open" from the "File" menu, but a handy shortcut is to just drag and drop the file into Audacity:

Windows: Drag the audio file icon into the open Audacity window.

Mac: Drag the audio file icon to the Audacity icon in the Dock.

Linux users: you can also run Audacity on the command line and give the name of the file to open as a command-line argument.

Step 3: Look at the waveform

This image shows a stereo waveform. The left channel is displayed in the top half of the track, and the right channel on the bottom. When the waveform is "larger", the audio is louder, and vice versa.
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The ruler above the waveform shows you the length of the audio in minutes and seconds.

Step 4: Listen to the audio file

The image above show the Control Toolbar. The functions of the buttons are (from left to right): Skip to Start, Play, Record, Pause, Stop and Skip to End. Click the Play button to listen to the audio. Click the Stop button to stop playback. If you don't hear anything, see Audacity Setup and Configuration. You can use the spacebar as a shortcut for Play and Stop. Click on the selection tool , then click on the waveform to choose a place to start, then click the Play button. Click and drag to create a selection, and then when you click Play, only the selection will play. You can also select audio entirely using the keyboard. For example you can use the left-arrow and right-arrow keys to move the cursor left and right in the waveform. Holding down the shift key while pressing the arrow keys will create and extend a selection. Holding down the shift and control (CTRL) keys while pressing the arrow keys will contract an existing selection. Clicking the Skip to Start button or pressing the Home key the will move the cursor to the beginning of the track. It's kind of like rewind, but it's not for playback - it will only work when playback is stopped. Similarly, clicking the Skip to End button move the cursor to the end of the track. or pressing the End key the will

You can use the keyboard to skip around the audio file while listening. For example:

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Press left-arrow to move the playback cursor back one second Press right-arrow to move the playback cursor forward one second

Press SHIFT + left-arrow to move the playback cursor back 15 seconds Press SHIFT + right-arrow to move the playback cursor forward 15 seconds

The amount the cursor moves in this situation is called the "seek time". The long and short seek times (one second and 15 seconds in the examples above) can be set in the Seek Time When Playing section of Playback Preferences.

Step 5: Create a 10-second clip from your audio

You edit audio waveforms in Audacity in much the same way as you would edit text in a word-processing document. When you are editing text you first select the text you want to change and then choose what you want to do with it. You might want to cut or copy the text, delete it, paste new text in it's place, or change it to bold. You do the same thing in Audacity: first zoom and select the range of audio you want to change, and then choose what you want to do with it.

The image above shows the Edit Toolbar with the Zoom buttons highlighted. This is the Zoom In tool, and this is the Zoom Out tool. To zoom in to get a closer look at the waveform, first choose the Selection Tool , then click near the point you're interested in, then click the Zoom In button. Keep clicking the Zoom In button until you see the detail you need. Note that when you click the Zoom In button the cursor is centered on the screen. There are also menu commands and keyboard shortcuts for zooming. View > Zoom In (or CTRL + 1) is the same as clicking the Zoom In button. View > Zoom Out (or CTRL + 3) is the same as clicking the Zoom Out button. View > Fit in Window (or CTRL + F) will zoom the waveform so it fits in the window. Use the Zoom commands so that you can make maximal use of your Audacity window to see as much detail as you need, or to make sure you see the entire file when necessary. Walk through deleting all but approximately 10 seconds of audio.
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To cut this audio file down to 10 seconds, follow these steps:

Click near the point where you want the 10-second piece to begin. Zoom in until the timeline shows 10 seconds or more before and after the cursor. While holding down the shift key, click 10 seconds to the right of the cursor. o Note that this is just like selecting a range of text in a word processor

Press the spacebar to listen to the selection. Adjust the start and end of the selection with the mouse: o Move the pointer over the start of the selection - the cursor will change to a left-pointing hand o Click and drag to adjust the beginning of the selection o You can adjust the end of the selection in a similar manner Optional - try adjusting the start and end of the selection with the keyboard o Pressing SHIFT + Left-arrow will expand the selection to the left o Pressing SHIFT + Right-arrow will expand the selection to the right o Pressing SHIFT + CTRL + Left-arrow will contract the selection from the right o Pressing SHIFT + CTRL + Right-arrow will contract the selection from the left Optional - try adjusting the start and end of the selection using the Selection Toolbar

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o o o

Click the "Length" radio button above the second group of numbers in the Selection Toolbar if it is not already selected Click on the first digit to the right of the decimal point in the Length box Press the 0 (zero) key - the digit changes to zero, the digit to the right is selected and the selection in the waveform changes to match Press the 0 key - the selection length is now 10.00 seconds.

You've now selected the portion of the audio that you want to keep. To delete everything except the selected audio, click on Edit > Trim. If you make a mistake, you can always click on Edit > Undo. Audacity has unlimited Undo and Redo. You can undo your editing actions all the way back to when you opened the file. You can also Redo actions that you have undone. You now have a region of audio that starts several seconds (or perhaps minutes) from the beginning of the track. Before you export this audio you want to move it to the beginning of the track. If you don't do this, the exported file will contain silence, then your 10-second piece of audio. To correct this, click on Tracks > Align Tracks > Align with Zero. This moves your audio to the beginning of the track.

Step 6: Fade out the last second

Click the Skip to End button Zoom In until you can see the last two or three seconds of the waveform Click in the waveform about 1 second before the end Click on Edit > Select > Cursor to Track End Click on Effect > Fade Out. The last second of the audio is smoothly faded out.

Note that we always select some audio first, then choose what action we want to perform on it.

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Step 7: Export the resulting file

When you save an Audacity project with File > Save you are doing just that saving an Audacity project. Audacity projects can be opened only by Audacity. If you want other programs (such as iTunes or Windows Media Player) to be able to open this file we need to export it. Before we export this 10 second clip to a separate file we're going to simplify things a bit. Go to the Import / Export Preferences, and under When exporting tracks to an audio file uncheck "Show Metatdata Editor prior to export step". Metatdata Editor adds extra information about the speech or music into the file. You can go back to the Import / Export Preferences at any time to re-enable Metadata Editor.

Exporting a WAV file

Click on File > Export - the standard "Save" dialog for your operating system appears. Give the file a different name. Audacity always suggests a name for the file that is the same as the name of your Audacity project. It is always best to alter this so you don't confuse your exported file with your Audacity project. Choose a location to save the file in the usual manner. At the bottom of the Save dialog is a popup menu labelled "Format". From this menu choose "WAV (Microsoft) signed 16-bit PCM". There are no options for the WAV file format, so there is no need to click the "Options" button. Click the "Save" button to complete the export of your project to a WAV file.

Exporting an MP3 file

In order to export files from Audacity in MP3 format you will need to download and install the optional LAME MP3 encoder. Instructions are here . Once you have downloaded and installed the LAME encoder you will be able to create MP3 files using Audacity.

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The steps for exporting a file in MP3 format are the same as for a WAV file, except:

In the Save dialog, from the "Format" menu, choose "MP3 files" Then click the "Options..." button to set the bit rate and other options for the MP3 file.

Step 8 - Testing your new Audio Production

To demonstrate the difference between an Audacity project (the AUP) file, and a sound file you export from an Audacity project:

Click on File > Close, saving changes if asked. Find the AUP file on your computer and attempt to open it with the audio player of your choice (e.g. iTunes, Windows Media Player). You can't. Find the exported WAV file on your computer and attempt to open it with the audio player of your choice. Success!

You can't open an Audacity project in a media player. Only by exporting your project can you listen to it in a media player. Once you've exported your project you should keep the original project file (AUP) and its associated _data folder around in case you want to make some changes to it in the future.

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THIS DOCUMENT IS A SELECTION FROM THE BOOK. YOU MAY PURCHASE THE ENTIRE BOOK AT

http://tinyurl.com/alternative-audacity

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12
Copying tapes, LPs or minidiscs to CD
You can use Audacity and your computer to record sound from any external device which outputs an audio signal. Although cassette tapes and records (LPs) are the most popular examples, Audacity can be used just as easily to record audio from the following:

Open-reel tape decks Minidisc (MD) players Radios Mixers Video cassette recorders (VCRs), Personal Video Recorders (PVRs) and DVD players (recording from a dedicated line-out containing audio output only) Televisions (via a SCART adapter cable connected to the computer sound card, or through a TV or VCR's audio out) Personal digital voice recorders (DVRs) Portable MP3 players (such as iPods) Other computers

How to connect your equipment

In general, you need to run an appropriate cable from an "out" jack on the external device (e.g. a tape deck, or an amplifier or receiver connected to a turntable) to the line-in port of the computer. You should not connect a standard turntable directly to a computer - see Special note on connecting a standalone turntable below. A typical cable you might use is a stereo mini-jack (3.5mm) to RCA cable.
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If your device does not have RCA out, the headphone jack is a good "out" jack to choose, since it will allow you to adjust the output level of the source device. If you choose this approach, the most typical setup is to use a cable with a 1/8 inch (3.5 mm) stereo jack at one end (for connecting to the device's headphone jack), and an identical 1/8 inch stereo jack on the other end (for connecting to the line-in socket on your computer). If the device you are recording from has a 1/4 inch (6.3 mm) headphone jack, you will need to get a 1/4 to 1/8 inch adapter. Such an adapter is often included free with most new headphones, or can be purchased separately at any electronics store. Some professionals with high-grade equipment would prefer to use the source device's "aux out", "tape out", "line-out" or "record" output (if so equipped), since that approach bypasses an unnecessary stage of (possibly low-quality) amplification, and standardizes the signal at a fixed (non-adjustable) level of approximately 1 - 1.5 volts, resulting in a higher quality recording. If you choose this approach, you will need a cable that has dual RCA red/white plugs at one end (for connecting to the "aux out", "tape out" or "record" jack of the device) and a stereophonic 1/8 inch (3.5 mm) plug at the other end (for connecting to your computer's line-in port). A typical cable you might use is a stereo mini-jack to RCA cable:

The RCA end might connect to the output jacks in the back of your cassette player:

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The stereo-mini end should be connected to your computer's line-in jack, usually found in the back. The line-in is normally colored blue, but check your computer manual. You should not generally connect to the microphone port of the computer, as this port, besides typically being monophonic, will excessively amplify the stronger signals produced by a tape deck or receiver/amplifier. The only exception to this might be the outputs of some personal recorders supplied with a minijack intended for connection to the microphone input of a recorder. To record in stereo, plug the audio cable into the blue port.

The terms "jack", "socket", and "port" can be used interchangeably. Until the advent of the Walkman in the 1980s, audio sockets were frequently 1/4 inch in diameter. Although professional audio equipment and guitar amplifiers continue to use this 1/4 inch standard, most contemporary consumer audio equipment has standardized on sockets that are half that size. Often called a 'minijack' or a
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'miniplug', these sockets will appear as 1/8 inch (3.5 mm) diameter holes. On computers, minijacks are used for the headphone, microphone (if present), and line-in (line-input) sockets. Most portable music players - including cassette players, CD players, and MP3 players - use minijacks exclusively for the headphones. However, some smartphone devices that can also play music use a 2.5 mm jack to maintain compatibility with hands-free telephony devices. Adapters to allow use of 2.5 mm equipment with 3.5 mm jacks are readily available at electronics stores and online. Another significant exception to this rule involves the headphone jacks used in better quality non-portable (home) audio equipment, such as home theater receivers and cassette decks, where the larger 1/4 inch jack is normally used. Also note that audio plugs (which fit into these sockets) can be either monophonic or stereophonic. A stereophonic plug can be identified by its use of three metallic rings separated by an insulator, while monophonic plugs will have only two rings. Note that the very tip of the plug and the shaft itself are both considered 'rings'. Some electronic stores sell cables that are monophonic, so it would be wise to inspect the plug to make sure it is what you want prior to making a purchase. In general, and especially if you are a novice, you will always want to purchase cables that are stereophonic.

Help if you don't have a line-in port Some Macs and notebook/laptop computers do not have a line-in port. In that case check if your microphone port can be toggled to line-in with a switch, or by changing the recording source in the software. On some laptops this line-level source is called "mix" or "stereo mix", in which case you could select this source in the system sound preferences. If you see a line-in option available, always choose that as your recording source. If you have neither a line-in port nor any way to switch the microphone port to line-in, you need to add a line-in by adding a USB sound card, or other suitable audio input/output device that connects to the computer via USB. Examples of recommendable input/output devices are the Griffin iMic which has a standard 1/8 inch input, and the Behringer UCA202 which has left and right RCA inputs also the Edirol UA-1G which has left and right RCA inputs and outputs and a digital S/PDIF input.

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Special note on connecting a tape deck

If you wish to record from an audio cassette or a reel-to-reel tape deck, you can connect that deck directly to your computer without the need for any external amplifier or receiver. Simply connect the deck's "line-out" RCA jacks to your computer's "line in" jack, using a cable described above. You can also connect to the headphones out jack of an integrated cassette deck or to that of an amplifier connected to the tape deck. If you do this (or if the "line-out" volume of your deck is adjustable), it's best to set that level quite close to its maximum, and adjust the recording level using Audacity's input volume slider (see below). This helps keep the inherent tape noise to a minimum in the signal sent to Audacity. If the cassette you are playing has been encoded with Dolby as denoted by the Dolby DoubleD symbol, then you must enable Dolby playback on your tape deck, or the recording of the tape will sound over-bright. Before transferring your cassette, you may want to clean and align your tape heads and also clean the transport mechanism (capstan and pinch roller).

Special note on connecting a standalone turntable

If you have a standalone turntable, you must not connect it directly to your computer. Instead, you must connect it to an amplifier or receiver with a "phono" or turntable input, or to a phono pre-amplifier - and then record from the amplifier's "line out" or "tape out" jacks. This is for two reasons: (1) the audio signals produced by a phono cartridge are too weak to record directly, and (2) most records manufactured from the 1950s onwards were produced with a standard type of equalization called "RIAA", which emphasizes high frequencies and de-emphasizes (reduces) low frequencies. If left uncorrected, this will result in a recording that sounds very "tinny". All amplifiers containing a "phono" stage will both boost the signal to line-level so it's suitable for input into a tape deck or a computer, and will reverse the RIAA equalization so that the records sound "normal" again. If you have an integrated "stack system" or "entertainment center" into which you plug your speakers, your record deck is already connected to a suitable amplifier. If you have a standalone turntable but no amplifier or pre-amp, you may want to consider the Behringer UFO202 or the ART USBPhonoPlus. These devices

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contain a built-in phono pre-amp and connect to your computer through a USB port. They can also be used to connect line level devices such as a cassette deck.

Special note on connecting a USB turntable

A USB turntable is a relatively new kind of turntable which is designed to connect directly to your computer's USB port. The concerns noted in the 'standalone turntable' section above do not apply here, as the necessary pre-amplification and RIAA equalization are already built into the USB turntable.

Special note on connecting a Minidisc player

Some users find that the line-level output of Minidisc players is too strong for recording on a computer and causes distortion, since its level is not adjustable. If you are encountering this problem, try connecting your cable to the player's headphone jack instead. Since the strength of the headphone signal is easily adjustable, you can then reduce the signal level sent to the PC. On most players, this means using the same shared line out/headphones out socket/jack, but choosing the headphones out option in the player's "Sound Out" Preferences menu.

Setting Up Audacity
1. Go to Devices Preferences and at "Recording Channels", choose whether to record in stereo or mono 2. Immediately above, we now set the the "Recording Device" and "Playback Device" explicitly to the built-in computer sound device, or to the specific sound device your cable is plugged into. Do NOT select "Microsoft Sound Mapper" or "Primary Sound Driver" on Windows machines: o Windows 7/Vista: Choose the line-in option for your connected sound device (for example, "Line-In: Realtek HD Device") o Windows XP or earlier or Linux: Select the connected sound device, then go to the Mixer Toolbar Input Selector to choose the line-in input source o OS X: Select the "line-in" recording device; if there isn't such, select the "Built-in" option then go to the Mixer Toolbar Input Selector to choose the line-in input source there
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3. If you cannot choose your input source as described above, or if the line-in input won't record, you can use the operating system mixer device to choose the required input.

Monitoring
1. Decide if you want to "monitor" your recording, that is, hear it played back as you make it: o Windows or Linux: Try "hardware playthrough". To use this, open the operating system sound mixer, then the Playback section, then unmute line-in and turn the volume up. You can find the system mixer in the Control Panel at Sound on Windows 7 or Vista, or Sounds and Audio Devices on Windows XP. On Linux, you can use ALSAmixer. o OS X: Try "hardware playthrough" in Recording Preferences If hardware playthrough does not work, or if the playback and recording devices in Preferences are different, choose "software playthrough" in Recording Preferences. If neither playthrough works on OS X, obtain the free LineIn software playthrough tool from Rogue Amoeba. Note: software playthrough will have a slight delay, and causes some extra load on the computer. 2. Set the volume level of your recording input. Click on the downward pointing arrow in the right hand (red) VU recording level meters:

and click "Start Monitoring". While playing a loud part of your tape or record, adjust the Input Slider on the Mixer Toolbar so the recording meters are almost reaching the right-hand end of the scale. Don't let the meter bars actually reach the right edge, or the red hold lights to right of the meter will come on, indicating you'll have distortion in the recording. If the recording level meters are not visible, click View > Toolbars and check Meter Toolbar.

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3. If the Mixer Toolbar Input Slider does not control the input level correctly, or is greyed out on maximum, use the input slider in the operating system mixer device to regulate the input level.

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13
Basic Recording, Editing and Exporting
Recording
Create a new Project by clicking File > Save Project As. Start your recording by pressing the red Record button, then starting the player. You can pause and restart the recording between tracks or sides with the blue Pause button, which keeps your recording on one track within Audacity. This is the easiest way to record into Audacity, because having just one track on screen allows you to split the recording up into the different songs or sections using "labels". See the tutorial: Splitting a recording into separate tracks for more on this. An alternative to using the Pause button is to Stop the recording at the end of the first side, then use Transport > Append Record (or shift-click on the Record button, or use the keyboard shortcut SHIFT+R) to continue recording on the existing track. If you do want to start new tracks for sides of the tape or LP on a new track in Audacity, then press the yellow Stop button to stop recording, get the LP or tape to where you want to go to, then press the red Record button in Audacity and start the player. The recording will now restart on a new track.

Editing, Noise Removal and Click Removal

When you have finished recording, press the yellow Stop button and save your recording into the Project you started (File > Save Project). Now the data is safe, you can edit it in Audacity if you want to (for example, cut redundant pieces out),
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or come back to it later by re-opening the saved Project file with the File > Open command. You may also want to remove steady noise such as tape hiss or vinyl roar using Audacity's Noise Removal, and clicks from records using its Click Removal. Removing clicks and pops is recommended when recording vinyl, as any loud click will interfere with maximizing the volume of the recording - the Amplify effect can't tell the difference between music and clicks. Select the entire track by clicking on the Track Control Panel or choosing Edit > Select > All then choose Effect > Click Removal. The default parameters in the Click Removal dialog will detect and remove most clicks, so try this first. If you find that it did not remove certain clicks or pops, select those regions in turn and apply the Click Removal effect, adjusting the parameters until it is successful. Linux users may be interested in trying Gnome Wave Cleaner which is free and open source. http://gwc.sourceforge.net/ Mac and Windows users may be interested in trying Brian Davies' Click Repair software. http://www.clickrepair.net/ .It is not free, but has a 21-day free trial period so you can try it out and see if it is worth it to you. Noise Removal is tricky to get right. You need to be prepared to experiment with the effect so that it removes as much noise as possible without damaging the sound you want to keep. It is more effective at removing cassette hiss than "vinyl roar".

Exporting
When you are happy with your editing, you need to export the recording as an audio file such as WAV or MP3 that you can either play on your computer media player (e.g. on iTunes or Windows Media Player), or which you can burn to an audio or MP3 CD. See the About WAV, AIFF, MP3, Audio CDs and MP3 CDs below about the difference between audio and MP3 CDs. To export a single audio file, use the File > Export ... command. If your recording contains multiple tracks or songs, you may want to export these from your Project as separate audio files. This would be necessary if you wanted to burn a CD with separate CD tracks corresponding to each track in your recording. To prepare your recording
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for export as separate audio files, see the tutorial Splitting a recording into separate tracks. If you are planning to burn a CD with your exported files you should ensure that you use the export format 16-bit PCM stereo WAV, this should be the default if you have not changed it. Also ensure that your Project Rate is 44.1kHz (44100 see the box in the bottom left hand corner of the Audacity window). About WAV, AIFF, MP3, Audio CDs and MP3 CDs WAV, AIFF and MP3 are the most common formats for exporting. WAV and AIFF files are of identical quality to the original recording, but take up 10 MB or more of disc space per minute. If you want to burn an "audio CD" that will play on any standalone CD player (note these only give you 74 - 80 minutes' playing time), export your recording as a 44100 Hz, 16 bit stereo WAV or AIFF file. See: Audio CDs. If you want your exported audio file to be smaller (you'd want to do this for example if you wanted to make it available on the internet), you can export as MP3, at the expense of losing some of the audio quality of the original. You can also burn the MP3s to a "data CD" or "MP3 CD" which will give you (at Audacity's default MP3 export settings) over 11 hours' playing time on the CD. Note you can only play these kind of CDs in computers, MP3 CD players (including some newer automotive players), or some DVD players. Generally, you will see an MP3 logo printed somewhere on the device if it is MP3-capable. Note that most players manufactured prior to 2005 will not be able to play MP3 CDs. To export as an MP3, you first need to add the LAME encoder to your system and show Audacity where it is. If you are exporting your file to a media program which has its own "Library" such as Windows Media Player, iTunes or Real Player, you would generally drag your exported file into the program's Library, or use the media program's built-in commands to add the exported file to its Library..

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Splitting a recording into separate tracks
The following tutorial demonstrates one method for dividing a recording into separate songs for export in preparation for burning those tracks to an audio CD. Others may recommend slightly different methods. It is worth going through this tutorial as it introduces the basic concepts of identifying and marking the boundaries between songs, and using labels to identify songs in support of the Export Multiple command. Live recordings versus studio recordings Sometimes songs on live recordings flow together. If you want to split a live recording into songs but want to maintain an uninterrupted flow from song to song on the CD you need to have burning software that is capable of burning a CD in "disk-at-once" (DAO) mode, and is capable of setting the "gap" or "pause" between tracks to 0 seconds.

Step 1 - Remove unwanted audio from the recording

Set Snap To: Off in the Selection Toolbar. Click the Skip to Start button . Zoom in until you can see from the start of the track to the start of the music. Click and drag from the start of the music to the start of the track. Click on Edit > Delete.
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Similarly, remove unwanted audio from the end of the recording and from the middle (between sides 1 and 2 of the LP or cassette). Note that later in this tutorial we will be using the Analyse > Find Silences command to identify spaces between the songs, so when you are editing the transition between side 1 and side 2 be sure to leave 2 or 3 seconds of silence, similar to what you would find between songs. Save your work! Click on File > Save Project

Step 2 - Label the Songs

Mark the first song

Click the Skip to Start button Click on Tracks > Add Label at Selection A new label is created in a new label track underneath the audio track. The contents of the label are selected and ready for editing.

Type the title of the first song

Do not use the following characters as part of the song title: \ / : * ? " < > | Mark the rest of the songs

Using the selection tool, click near the beginning of the second song Repeatedly click the Zoom In button until you can see just the first few seconds of the song Click as closely as possible to the start of the song Click on Tracks > Add Label at Selection Type the name of the song into the label

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Repeatedly click the Zoom Out button until you can see the start of the third song Continue in this manner adding a label to mark the start of each song

You could also use the Analyze > Silence Finder... or the Analyze > Sound Finder... command to automatically find and mark the silences between tracks. Here is a quick demonstration of using the Silence Finder command. The Sound Finder command works in a similar manner.

Step 3 - Maximize the volume of the recording

If you did the original recording properly and avoided clipping, the recording is probably not at the maximum possible volume. In order for the CD you burn to be at maximum volume and thus match other CDs in your collection we need to fix this.

Click on Edit > Select > All Click on Effect > Amplify Accept (for now) the default choices in this dialog and click the "OK" button The volume of your recording is maximized.

Note that Amplify retains any volume differences between channels of a stereo track. In practice however, consumer-level turntables, tape decks and/or amplifiers may well record stereo channels with a stronger signal in one channel
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than the other, which you will probably want to correct. In that case, use Effect > Normalize instead. One problem when copying records is that a loud click in one channel can cause Normalize to create an unwanted change in the stereo balance. In that case you should consider removing the click before the Normalize step, using Click Removal.

Step 4 - Export
Congratulations, you are now ready to export the tracks.

Click on File > Export Multiple o Choose the Export Format from the pop-up menu: for CD burning choose 16-bit AIFF if you're using a Mac, or 16-bit WAV if your using Windows or Linux for loading into an MP3 player, choose MP3 for loading into iTunes/iPod you can export as WAV and use iTunes to convert the WAVs to AACs or MP3s o Click the Choose... button and pick the place where your exported tracks will be saved. o Under Split Files Based On: Labels should be checked. Include audio before first label should be unchecked, as there is no audio before the first label. o Under Name Files, Using Label/Track Name should be checked o Click the Export button. o The Metadata Editor dialog will open. If you want to, enter common information in the Metatdata Editor dialog (e.g. Artist Name and Album Title) Click the "OK" button in the Metatdata Editor dialog, not the "Save" button

Metadata in this context refers to information stored in the audio file such as Artist, Album and Song Title. While this is widely used with MP3 files, it is less useful for AIFF and WAV files. To avoid having the Metadata Editor pop up for each track you are about to export, click on Preferences, click on the Import / Export tab, and uncheck Show Metatdata Editor prior to export step.
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A progress dialog might appear if the process takes more than a second or two. When the process is finished a confirmation dialog will appear listing the files that were created. The tracks are now ready to import into the CD burning software of your choice. If you burn a CD with a gap of zero seconds between tracks (if your burning software supports this), you will end up with an exact replica of the LP or cassette. If, when burning the CD, you add the standard 2-second gap between each track you will be adding an additional 2 seconds to the existing silence between tracks, and the vinyl surface noise or cassette hiss will suddenly disappear which some listeners may find annoying. See Refinements, below, for ways of dealing with this.

Refinements Remove the "silence" between songs

Of course, the space between songs is not really "silent" - it contains vinyl surface noise or cassette hiss. Using standard editing techniques you can select and delete these portions of the recording, then insert whatever gap (silent portion) you want when burning the CD. If you will be listening to the songs primarily on a computer or MP3 player you may prefer to have some silence at the end of each song. In this case select the silent portion then click on Edit > Silence Audio. Now you can edit the length of the silent portion to your taste. Alternatively you can delete the silent portion, then click on Generate > Silence and specify exactly how much silence you want.

Avoiding a sudden cut-off of vinyl surface noise or cassette hiss

Both of the above techniques will result in the vinyl surface noise or cassette hiss suddenly stopping, which some listeners may find annoying. You can avoid this by putting a quick fade-out at the end of each song. You can do the fade-out after the music ends (in effect fading out the noise), or you can fade out the last second or so of the song if that works with the music. Experiment and listen to the results to decide what works for you and for the music you are working on.
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Burning music files to a CD
Audio CDs
One of the key things to note is that it is important that you burn an Audio CD (Music CD) and not a Data CD. If you do burn a data CD you will find that it will play happily on your computer but it is extremely unlikely that it will load of play in any of your CD players. Audio CDs always contain high quality uncompressed PCM stereo data at 44 100 Hz sample rate, 16 bit resolution. So if you want to burn an audio CD, you should always export the file you want to burn as a 44 100 Hz 16 bit stereo WAV or AIFF file.

Burning software
In order to burn an Audio CD you will need to use a CD burner application. Most computers already come with media player software that can burn CDs. For example you can use Windows Media Player built into Windows or iTunes built into Macs. In either of these applications, drag the files you want to burn from the location you exported them to into a "playlist" ready for burning. You can also use a standalone burning program like Nero or Toast to burn your exported files. In this case, open the files from within that software, do not drag and drop them from your file manager.

Gapless burning
By default, many CD burning programs will add a 2 second gap between CD tracks (this is part of the standard for CDs) so be aware of this when placing your
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labels, and consider deleting excess silences between tracks. However most CDburner programs will optionally let you burn the CD with no gaps between the tracks, so you may wish to set your own gaps between tracks in your Audacity editing and then select Gapless burning when you burn the CD. For some recordings, for example live concerts, you may wish to have no gap at all. Note, however, that some CD burners including Windows Media Player, have no such option.

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LP digitization
It is not the only way of working - there are many alternatives. Like any recipe it can be adapted to suit your personal needs. Most of the clean-up steps are optional and need only be applied if your particular recording requires them. You can work in AIFF rather than WAV if required. Note that this workflow does not at any stage necessitate the saving of an Audacity project (though you may wish to do that if you need to interrupt your work). It relies on the export of WAV files. All of the processing in this tutorial is carried out with Audacity. Some users may prefer to use alternative software for specific sub-tasks like noise removal and the removal of clicks and pops (current Audacity Click Removal may not give as good results as other software).

Audacity settings
Work with Audacity set to a project rate of 44100 Hz and 32-bit sample format. Use 16-bit if you prefer; it will give smaller working file-sizes but you may lose a little quality in some of the processes. Export WAV files at 44100 Hz 16-bit PCM stereo. That is the standard required for burning CDs and it will produce WAVs that are accepted for import by iTunes (and other music player software).

Clean the LP
Cleaning the LP carefully and thoroughly before recording it will reduce the number of clicks and pops and will improve the quality of your recording.
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Prepare a solution of water mixed with a little washing-up detergent. Use a clean washcloth or a piece of velvet to carefully wipe the LP surfaces - try not to get the label wet. The detergent will float away all the greasy fingerprints - a gentle scrubbing motion will help. Rinse in luke warm water until all the detergent is gone and then finally rinse in distilled water which drys and leaves nothing behind. Ensure your record is thoroughly dry before playing - do not be tempted to play the record "wet" as this may damage the LP and possibly your stylus. There are a number of commercially available cleaning fluids and cleaning machines that you may wish to consider:

KAB EV-1 Record Cleaner & KAB cleaning solution Disco Antistat Discwasher

Recording levels
Check the levels: play portions of the LP, or even the whole side of the LP, to check the recording levels so that you avoid any clipping during the recording. Try to aim for a maximum peak of around 6 dB (or 0.5 if you have your meters set to linear rather than dB}. Tip: enlarging the Meter Toolbar by clicking and dragging helps with this task.

Capture
Record both sides into the project prior to doing the processing. You may find it helpful to zoom out so as to show the whole side of the LP in the Audacity window. You can if you wish work with single sides of an LP as it gives a smaller working set.

Place-holders for song labels

Mark the approximate label points: click in the waveform at the approximate point between the tracks on the album, then click CTRL+B. Alternatively you can mark a label point while recording by using CTRL+M.

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Raw master backup

Export a single WAV for this side of the LP at 32-bit float (not 16-bit). Retain this WAV file as a maximum quality "raw-capture" file that you can import back in to Audacity later for any future re-editing (or to start over with editing if you damage the project while working on it).

Remove DC offset
DC offset can occur at the recording stage so that the recorded waveform is not centered on the horizontal line at 0.0 amplitude. Use the Normalize effect to remove any DC offset. Put a check mark in "Remove any DC offset..." but leave "Normalize maximum amplitude..." unchecked.

Remove subsonic rumble and low frequency noise

Use Effect > High Pass Filter... with a setting of 24 dB per octave rolloff, and a cutoff frequency of 20 - 30 Hz to remove unwanted subsonic frequencies which can cause clicks when editing. If your record is warped, this will definitely generate unwanted subsonics, in which case consider a lower cutoff frequency. This step can probably be omitted given a flat record and high quality turntable, arm and cartridge.

Remove clicks and pops

There are a number of ways you can use Audacity to remove clicks and pops from your recording. Use the Click Removal effect on either selected regions of audio or on the whole project. Preview the effect with different settings to get the best results. Clicks which did not get removed with Click Removal can be treated individually with other methods. These are only really useful if you have a relatively small number of clicks and pops to deal with, otherwise the approach may be too labour-intensive and time-consuming:

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Try Audacity's Repair effect. This repairs a very short length of up to 128 samples by interpolating from the neighbouring samples. You will need to zoom in to see the individual samples to use this effect. For somewhat longer regions of audio, try: o Draw Tool. You also need to be zoomed in to the individual samples to use this. Some patience may be needed with this tool, but the principle is to put samples back into line with their neighbours so that a smooth contour is presented. o Effect > Hard Limiter.... This is an extreme compressor effect, but can be effective used on an individual click. There is no need to zoom right in to sample level to use this.

Remove hiss and high frequency noise

Get a noise sample from either the lead-in grooves immediately before the music starts, or from a lead-in between tracks. Apply the Noise Removal effect with Noise Reduction set to no more than 12 dB (9 dB is a good guideline), Frequency smoothing 300 Hz and Attack/decay time 0.25 seconds. Noise reduction is always a compromise, because on the one hand you can have all the music and a lot of noise, and on the other hand, no noise and only some of the music. Try different settings on the "Noise Reduction (dB)" slider until you get the best compromise. Whether you need to use Noise Removal will depend on the quality of your LPs and your stylus and cartridge.

Clean the inter-track gaps

These are rarely truly silent so you may want to replace them with silence by selecting the gap and using CTRL+L. Reduce the inter-track gap as desired to around a maximum of 2 seconds, though you may wish to use a shorter gap or even no gap at all for some recordings. Note that CD burning software almost always adds a 2-second gap between tracks by default. Check for any options to turn this off, or for "gapless burning" or "Disc-at-once (DAO)" options that you can enable.
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Adjust label positions

If you are using a 2-second gap, adjust the label position as desired to be 0.5 seconds before the start of the next track. To move the label, drag by its center circle.

Fade Ins/Outs
You may wish to more cleanly Effect > Fade Out the track ends and Effect > Fade In the track beginnings. Normally fade outs should be longer, and fade ins, if required, quite short. As an alternative: you may find it easier to do: fade-out, silence gap, fade-in, shorten gap, adjust label position in that order, one track at a time.

Track names
Edit the labels for the song names: we suggest using 01 <song-name_1>, 02 <song-name_2>, and so on as this helps keep them in the right order for CD production or loading into iTunes. You may find that changing the zoom level will help you with this task - or you can advance to the next label by ensuring that the focus is in the current label then using the <Tab> key. In Audacity 1.3.12 a new feature has been added which will automatically prefix named tracks with a sequential two-digit number. In the "Name files" section of the Export Multiple dialog, select the "Numbering before Label/Track Name" radio button.

Amplitude adjustment
Adjust the amplitude of the recording. Use Effect > Amplify as the last editing step to bring the amplitude up to around -1 dB. Use Amplify rather than Normalize as Audacitys Normalize effect operates on each stereo channel independently and can thus change the stereo balance. If your equipment is not balanced you may prefer to use the Normalize effect.

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Compression
The Compressor effect reduces the dynamic range of audio. One of the main purposes of reducing dynamic range is to permit the audio to be amplified further (without clipping) than would be otherwise possible. Compressor makes the loud parts quieter and (optionally) the quiet parts louder. It can be very useful for listening to classical music in a car. Such music normally has a wide dynamic range and can thus be difficult to listen to in a car without constant volume re-adjustment.

Export a set of WAVs

Use Export Multiple to produce a set of WAVs for each track on the LP at 44.1kHz 16-bit PCM stereo. Audacity will down-sample on export from 32-bit to 16-bit. Shaped dither noise will be applied by default to cover any clicky noise that may result from the conversion from 32-bit to 16-bit. Advanced users can change the type of dither, or turn it off, in the Quality Preferences. Place all the files for a particular album in a specific named folder for that album to facilitate later retrieval and use.

Export Labels
Some users advise a final step of exporting a file containing the labels. Use File > Export Labels... This produces a text file that you can later re-import using File > Import > Labels..., should you wish to re-edit from the raw capture file that you backed up earlier in the workflow.

Backup
Backup your WAV files: you don't want to lose all that valuable work and do it all over again, do you? Use two separate external 1 TB USB disks to hold the WAVs - each LP can be stored in its own named folder by artist (or composer for classical) to make retrieval easier.

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Alternative software

GoldWave: though nominally not free, it is effectively a top class, free click remover as well as an excellent alternative audio editor (its click removal is an effect, just like in Audacity). The trial version limits you to a hundred or so commands per session, and a total number of several thousand commands before it expires, but if you export from Audacity as 32 bit WAV and just do Click Removal in it, you should be able to do several hundred records for free. Note that Audacity's Noise Removal is probably superior to Goldwave noise removal on the whole. Gnome Wave Cleaner: - for Linux users

Clicks & pops

ClickRepair: A good tool for removing Clicks and Pops is Brian Davies' ClickRepair. Some new users may find it a bit intimidating as an entry level tool, but once you have understood the settings you want to use it is effectively an automated tool. It is not free, but many users report that its saves a lot of time and produces good results.

Hiss & noise removal

SoundSoap: - reckoned to be better for broadband noise reduction than for click removal. Note that this software is not free.

Compression

Chris's dynamic compressor: this tool gets much favourable mention on the Audacity Forum. http://pdf23ds.net/software/dynamic-compressor/

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Recording 78rpm records
Ideally use a turntable with 78rpm and adjustable speed - though you can use lower speed dubbing. Use a proper 78 stylus - you may want a separate headshell/cartridge. Clean your records thoroughly. Audacity setup - use the defaults: 32-bit float sample format and 44100 Hz Project Rate .Processing to adjust equalization and remove noise - and review results. Export to WAV/MP3 in the normal way.

Use a special stylus or cartridge

You should not use a normal stylus (needle) to play 78's. The grooves on a 78 are significantly wider and deeper than the grooves on an LP, so a normal stylus will bottom out in the grooves and also bounce from side to side in louder passages. This will result in:

noisier, more hissy transfers far less accurate reproduction of the music damage to the stylus which will then impair its further use for LP's

Check the web site or manual for your turntable to see if the manufacturer supplies a special 78 rpm stylus or cartridge. If not, search the web for "78 rpm stylus". If you can afford it, use a separate cartridge which will support tracking at the heavier 4 or 5 gram weights that most 78 rpm's need. Ideally you should consider more than one stylus width if you are playing really old shellac records, because there was no standardisation of groove dimensions until late in the 78 rpm era. Again, search on the internet for advice. Use a spare headshell
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The safest way to swap between stylus types (if you are doing this often) is to use a separate headshell and cartridge. This way you will not be continually swapping the stylus on your cartridge - a risky procedure.

Cleaning the records

Try to clean the 78s as thoroughly as possible before recording. This will save you time later as cleaning clicks/pops is hard work if you do it manually. Do not use alcohol-based solvents on the shellac, use only water or water-based cleaners. You can use a bit of washing up liquid on a piece of velvet and warm water. Give them all a wash, in cool not hot water, and place them in the dish rack - then change the water and rinse thoroughly - finally rinse off with distilled (deionized) water, then drain and dry off with a dry piece of velvet. Avoid wiping with kitchen paper or similar, as these are both abrasive, and can leave fibres stuck in the grooves. If you are in a hurry, placing the record on a piece of kitchen towel can absorb the majority of the distilled water, but avoid wiping the record. You should never attempt to play a shellac disc when it is wet.

Repair
Fairly obviously, do not record warped, cracked or badly chipped records. With a certain amount of patience, problems such as this can be repaired.

Equalization
When recording 78 rpm's, there is a problem that the pre-amplification built into any consumer-level pre-amplifier or USB turntable will be designed for vinyl records made from the 1950s onwards. This is because the pre-amplification not only provides the necessary amplification for the cartridge signal that is sent to Audacity, but applies what is known as "RIAA playback equalization" to it. This equalization is essential when playing records made from the 1950s or later, as it cancels out the high frequency biased "RIAA recording equalization" that such records are cut with, making them sound normal again. The problem is that most 78 rpm records were not cut with such a strong high frequency bias. They
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therefore sound dull if played through modern equipment that applies RIAA playback equalization. So, to make a fully professional job of transferring your 78 rpm records, you should open Effect > Equalization in Audacity immediately after recording, and apply the inverse of the RIAA playback curve (see the next section). This will cancel out the unwanted RIAA equalization, after which you can apply one of the 78 rpm playback curve presets supplied with the effect. Note that the 78 rpm curves are generic. In practice, many different equalizations were used according to the record label or even the recording engineer.

Lower speed dubbing - 33 1/3 or 45rpm

If your turntable does not have the facility to play records at 78rpm, you can use Audacity's ability to change the speed of recordings to record your 78 rpm records at either 33 1/3 rpm or 45 rpm. Since you are playing the disk slower than normal, tracking should not be an issue. The top frequency on a 78 will be around 8 kHz, and playing it slower will lower that to about 4.6 kHz. If your turntable doesn't have a strobe or speed adjustment, you can measure the playback speed in revolutions per minute (RPM) very accurately thus: 1. Record the leadout of the final groove and select the distance between the recorded clicks in the Audacity waveform 2. Measure the time taken for 10 consecutive revolutions (you can measure to 1/1000 of a second by zooming in on the waveform) 3. Divide that time by 10 (for example, if you measured 8 seconds, dividing that by 10 gives you a resultant value of 0.8) 4. Divide the resultant value into 60 (in our example, 60/0.8 gives us the answer that the record was playing at 75 RPM) Record the track into Audacity at your chosen speed and then simply select all the track by clicking in the Track Control Panel (where the mute/solo buttons are) and click Effect > Change Speed. In the "From" box choose the speed you played the record at (for example, "33 1/3" or "45") and in the "To" box choose the speed you want to convert the recording to (i.e. the speed it should be played at according to the label).

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Note that you should reverse the RIAA equalization before changing speed - now the transfer is "flat". Then change the speed. Then apply the "proper" 78 rpm equalization (whatever that may be). So the workflow steps for this part of the process are: 1. 2. 3. 4. Record the 78 at 45 or 33 1/3 Apply the Inverse RIAA EQ (to make it like a "flat" recording) Change the speed to 78rpm Apply appropriate EQ for what the 78 was recorded with

Note on actual speeds: With the early clockwork turntable mechanisms the rotational speed was rather approximate and manufacturers produced records in the 70 to 90rpm range with 78 being the most commonly accepted standard. Many disks had the speed stamped on the label and they depended on the early players which had a speed control. With the introduction of the synchronous AC motor, for detailed technical reasons, the standard was changed to 78.26 rpm. Stanton T-series USB turntables still offer 78rpm working, and helpfully they have a wide speed adjustment range. If you know exactly what speed your records should spin at you can find a strobe disk on the Internet and print one out with exactly the right spacing of bars. One example site is: http://www.78rpm.com/rescat/strobe_info.htm.

Filtering & noise removal

Noise on 78's is complex, and relatively high in level. You will need to try to reduce some of the different types of noise in separate passes.

Noise removal
Over the years your 78s will undoubtedly have received scratches and wear, which will result in clicks, pops and crackle. Audacity does have tools for click removal and noise removal - but there are better tools than Audacity for removing these, although "Effect > Repair" works extremely well for removing single clicks.

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Some of these tools do cost some money but most have free-trial periods. Goldwave is often recommended by Audacity users, as are Brian Davies' ClickRepair and DeNoise packages.

Filtering
1. Make sure you have set the Audacity bit depth to 32-bit floating (the default) because you are probably going to do a fair bit of processing, and some of the filters appear to work better with 32-bit files. 2. Perform DC offset correction. You do this uing the Normalize Effect - but do not apply any Normalization at this stage, just the DC offest. 3. Then run a low pass filter to remove high frequency noise - set the cut off frequency to suit the vintage of the record. For recordings from the 1940s or later set the cutoff frequence at 9 kHz or 10 kHz; for electrical recordings (1926 to 1939) about 8 kHz, and acoustic recordings (before 1926) about 7 kHz. Use at least 12 dB per octave, 24 dB per octave could probably be better. Listen to the result to make sure the sudden cut-off of high-frequency noise does not sound too artificial. 4. Then deal with the low frequency noise - select a "noise sample" from the current audio track (that is, a section of the recording that is surface noise only) and copy it to a new track. Use Analyze > Plot Spectrum to see the noise frequency content. Use a low pass filter on this noise sample to isolate the lower frequency noise, (for a very rough and ready setting, try 12dB per octave at 1000 Hz), then use the resulting sample for the "noise profile" for the Noise Reduction effect. Finally, select the original track and run the Noise Reduction effect. An alternative, simpler, method for dealing with low frequency noise is to use the high pass filter to filter out frequencies below 20 Hz. It's amazing that the waveform can display these sub-sonic frequencies, usually deficiencies in the cutting lathe during the original recording session.

Click Removal
Remove any clicks and pops from the recording using Effect > Click Removal or using alternative third party software as discussed above.

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Normalization & Compression

As a final step you may wish to adjust the loudnesss of you recording.

Normalize
You can use Effect > Normalize to bring the maximum volume of your recording to a specified level - we would suggest to around -1 dB. Audacity's Effect > Amplify can also be used for the same function.

Compression
As a final step, to increase the perceived loudness and density of the recording, more advanced users can perform compression on the recording. You can use Audacity's Effect > Compressor to do this. Alternatively an excellent free compressor that is often recommended is Chris's Compressor. This is a Nyquist plug-in that can be added to the Audacity plug-ins folder inside the Audacity installation folder. Restart Audacity, then the new plugin will be underneath the divider in the Effect menu.

Review & Export

Then review the track to decide if any further treatment is required, or if you need to restart from scratch. If you are happy with your work than your project is ready for Export to WAV and/or MP3 etc.

Backup
Don't forget to backup your finished audio files as you will not want to lose all that hard work; ideally at least two separate copies on separate media. You may wish to consider also backing up your original capture masters as WAV files, then you can always come back to the raw recording later and re-process it if you need or want to. Don't expect miracles with badly worn records. The process can be very frustrating and the results can be disappointing. Avoid aggressive denoise. The artifacts are usually worse than the noise. Some users like to leave a little surface
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noise in their transfers (they are 78s after all!). Declick and equalization are the most important steps in the process. Learn to read the waveform. Sometimes an equalization can increase the amplitude of some frequencies to a clipping level, so consider reducing the amplitude slightly before equalization.

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Recording with USB turntables
USB turntables are designed to transfer records to digital audio files or CDs by connecting to the computer's USB port, and are especially useful if your computer doesn't have the line-in port needed when digitizing LPs with a conventional turntable. USB turntables often include a line input for transferring from tape decks or similar sources as well. Audacity is suitable for recording from any make of USB turntable, using the instructions on this page. Several manufacturers of USB turntables now bundle Audacity with their product, notably Ion Audio, Numark, Kam and Lenco.

Ensure the Audacity software is up to date

Make sure you have a current version of the Audacity software as the software provided on the turntable manufacturer's CDs can be out of date. Note that neither the version number of the CD nor that of any guides produced by the manufacturers relates to the version of Audacity that you have. You should always check the current version of Audacity you have by clicking Help > About in the program (or Audacity > About if you are on OS X). Then go to the Audacity download site and, if needed, grab the latest Audacity download for your operating system.

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Ensure your manufacturer's guides are up to date

There can be confusion about the guides provided with the turntables, which are written by the turntable manufacturer rather than by Audacity. Sometimes the guides supplied with the turntables are out of date, or have errors. These are the main errors that you may come across:

You don't need to select stereo mix in the dropdown selector of Audacity's Mixer Toolbar. The dropdown selector is always grayed out when the turntable is correctly selected as Audacity's recording device. Audacity Preferences are not under the File menu except in the legacy 1.0.0 version of Audacity which is only appropriate for Mac users on OS 9. Preferences are under the Edit menu, except for users on OS X where they are under the Audacity menu. You do not need to select Monitor Input each time you launch Audacity. Monitoring the input is optional and allows you to hear the turntable through the computer speakers just like an ordinary turntable whenever it's playing, without having to record. If you want to select Monitor Input, you need to have the Meter Toolbar enabled (note: NOT the Mixer Toolbar that current guides state). Instructions on this are below.

Set up Audacity to record from the turntable

Connect the USB cable of the turntable to the computer, then launch Audacity (restart Audacity if it was already running when you connected the cable). Go to the Devices tab of Preferences and:

In the "Recording" section, select the USB device from the "Device" menu. Set the "Channels" menu to "2 (stereo)". In the "Playback" section, select your inbuilt sound or sound card by name from the "Device" menu. Do NOT choose "Microsoft SoundMapper" if you are on Windows.

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Switch to the Recording tab of Preferences and:

Check "Software Playthrough" if you want to hear the turntable through the computer speakers.

Click the "OK" button to accept the settings you have made.

Go to the Mixer Toolbar and turn up the left-hand output volume slider (by the speaker symbol). The right-hand input volume slider (by the microphone symbol) can often be used to vary the loudness of the recording, but it may not function with all turntables. If it does not, try adjusting the input level on the turntable (if it has a gain control) or in the Windows system mixer (right-click over the speaker icon by the system clock). If you are on a Mac, you should also click on the Mac hard disk, then Applications > Utilities > Audio-MIDI Setup. Click on the Audio Devices tab, then on the left-hand side, select your USB device in the "Default Input" and "Properties for" dropdowns. If you are on OS X 10.1 or earlier, go to Apple Menu > System Preferences > Sound, click the Input button and select USB Audio CODEC. Make sure that your Project Rate bottom left of the Audacity screen is set to 44100 Hz. Then, ignoring any instructions in the manufacturer's guide to select "stereo mix", simply press the red Record button in Audacity to start recording from the turntable.

High Speed Dubbing

Because Audacity can change the speed of recordings, it's possible to record your 33 1/3 rpm records into Audacity at 45 rpm (so transfer them more quickly). Once the track is recorded into Audacity, simply select all the track by clicking in the Track Control Panel (where the mute/solo buttons are) and click Effect > Change Speed. In the "From" box choose the speed you played the record at (e.g. "33 1/3" or "45") and in the "To" box choose the speed you want to convert the recording to (i.e. the speed it should be played at according to the label).
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Where you are recording at a faster speed than normal e.g. recording a 33 1/3 rpm record at 45 rpm, it's recommended to set the sample rate in the Project Rate button bottom left of the Audacity window to a higher sample rate than 44.1kHz to ensure you record the full audio spectrum. For recording 33rpm records played at 45rpm, a sample rate of 60k or more is needed to record the full 20kHz spectrum. If 44.1k sample rate is used when recording, the final audio will be limited to 14.8kHz bandwidth. Also set the bit depth to 32-bit as this will give better quality when the Change Speed effect is applied..

Why you should not do this

Accelerated recording does not give the best sound quality, for two reasons:

The playback equalization curve is being applied incorrectly in the record deck preamp. While correct for normal speed play, all music content is frequency shifted during accelerated play, and equalization is therefore incorrect. Cartridges behave poorly beyond 20kHz, and an accelerated deck is using the cartridge at up to 27kHz to play back audio content of up to 20kHz. Consequently distortion will rise, high frequency response will be more peaky, and generally the highest frequencies will be lost. How much of an issue this quality loss is depends on the cartridge, but it will always be present, with no cartridges giving as good performance to 27kHz as they do to 20kHz.

Consider the case where you have a superbly-recorded 33 1/3 rpm vinyl LP that contains audio with frequencies ranging from 20Hz to 20kHz (the nominal full range of human hearing). When you play it back at 78 it will sound like chipmunks on helium. In effect you have translated that original frequency range to the range of approximately 47Hz to 46.8kHz. Now the cartridge that is playing back these frequencies was designed to reproduce the 20-20kHz range, and if it's really, really high end it might be able to reproduce frequencies up to 25kHz. So everything from 25kHz upwards is lost during high-speed playback. You end up with recorded frequencies in the range 47Hz to 25kHz. Now we use software to reduce the speed back to normal. The chipmunks become human again. And the resulting frequency range we're left with is 20Hz to 10.7kHz. You basically lost all the high frequencies. This is assuming the best possible recording with the best possible cartridge and no losses during the software speed-reduction step. The
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results will be even worse if the cartridge is average - if it cannot reproduce frequencies above 20kHz your resulting recording (after speed reduction) will have no frequencies above 8.5kHz. Now this is just the first part. The second part involves the RIAA playback equalization (EQ). The LP was recorded with this EQ curve at normal speed. When you play it back at high speed all the frequencies are shifted and the playback EQ curve is applied to the wrong frequencies. This would also need to be corrected in software. Third, even if your cartridge could reproduce frequencies up to 50kHz (which is highly doubtful), there is no guarantee that your pre-amp will pass these frequencies, and even if it did it is highly unlikely that the playback EQ curve would be well-defined at frequencies above 20kHz. Not only will your recordings sound muffled, you will damage your LPs by doing this. The stylus that tracks the groove in the record is part of a mechanical system. When it can't move fast enough to follow the grooves (which is what happens when you play a 33 at 78), it just ploughs through the grooves, inflicting permanent damage. Running a record fast to "get it over with" has one problem above all else. The needle is designed to vibrate and move very accurately only in a narrow range. Exceed that range and the needle stops picking up the music.

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Exporting to iTunes
The workflow concentrates on AAC music files because that is Apple's native, default, format. Some users may prefer to use uncompressed WAVs/AIFFs or compressed Apple Lossless formats for their music files in iTunes. It is not the only way of working - there are many alternatives. Like any recipe it can be adapted to suit your personal needs. You can work in AIFF rather than WAV if required, many Apple Mac users would probably prefer to work in AIFF.

Workflow Export the WAV files

Use Export or Export Multiple to produce a WAV file or set of WAVs. With Audacity set to a project rate of 44100 Hz and 32-bit sample format (these are the default quality settings), exporting will by default produce 44.1kHz 16-bit PCM WAV files (or AIFF files on Mac). Audacity will down-sample from its 32-bit internal format to 16-bit, with shaped dither noise applied to cover any clicky noise that may result from the conversion to 16-bit. Advanced users can change the type of dither, or turn it off, in the Quality Preferences. 16-bit export will ensure the files are compatible with all versions of iTunes, They will also be compatible for conversion to AAC or other formats (or for CD burning) in iTunes. It is possible to export 32-bit PCM files too, by choosing "Other uncompressed files" in either export dialog, then clicking Options. These files will theoretically be of marginally higher quality but twice the size of 16-bit files. Latest versions of iTunes will play them, but other players may not.
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Add the WAV files into iTunes

Add the WAV files to the iTunes library (using the iTunes command File > Add File to Library or File > Add Folder to Library). Note that even if iTunes Import Preferences are set to Import Using AAC Settings ( Edit > Preferences > General > Import Settings ), no conversion takes place as this preference only applies to importing from CD.

Use iTunes to edit the metadata for the album name and artist
Make sure that one of the columns you have showing in your iTunes library is Kind. The imported files will show as WAV and can be listed together by clicking on the "Kind" column header. Select all the WAV files and use iTunes' metadata editor to enter the album name and the artist name so that you can easily find it later when editing the other metadata tags. You could alternatively set this metadata prior to Audacity Export using Audacity's metadata editor some users report that it is easier to use iTunes rather than Audacity to manage the metadata.

Use iTunes to make AAC copies in the library from the WAV files
Provided that you did not already have other WAV files in your iTunes library, the WAV files you need should still be the only selected tunes at this stage, providing that you have done no further clicking. Make sure that you have your iTunes Import Settings set to AAC at your required bitrate. Convert them to AAC by using the iTunes command Advanced > Create AAC version . Note carefully that this makes a copy not a straight conversion so at this stage your library will contain both the AAC and the WAV copies of the songs. If you have plenty of room you may wish to keep the WAV files in your iTunes library to for their lossless quality and not convert them to AAC. In that case you should omit this conversion step and the next step which deletes the WAV files from your iTunes library. Yet another option is to set iTunes to convert to Apple Lossless which has about half the file size of WAV.

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Or you may wish to use MP3 files in your iTunes library instead of AAC. In that case either export as MP3 from Audacity for import into iTunes or import WAVs and set iTunes to convert to MP3 rather than its default AAC. Note that for equivalent file size, AAC is generally reckoned to give better quality audio than MP3, but MP3 is a much safer choice if you want to send the file to someone else.

Delete the WAV files from the library

The WAV files should still remain as the selected tunes - just take extreme care at this stage (the AACs are created but selection is not forced by iTunes) So then just Delete the selected WAV files using the Delete key - and send the files to the wastebasket. Note carefully that this workflow assumes that you have iTunes is set to copy files in, NOT to reference external files - so the WAVs that are deleted are iTunes copies of the original source WAVs. This is set in Edit > Preferences > Advanced with the Copy tunes into iTunes folder when adding to library tickbox.

Edit the metadata tags of the tracks/album

Edit the metadata tags for Song Name, track number etc. The album should be easy to locate in iTunes as you have already edited the Album tag in a previous workflow step above. You may wish to edit the song titles to remove the leading 01, 02 etc numbering that was applied earlier to facilitate the correct ordering of the songs.

Fetch the album artwork

Find a copy of the album artwork - either directly via iTunes if the album is recognized by the Gracenote database CDDB (but note that Gracenote does not always carry the artwork) - or by fetching it from Amazon/Wikipedia/wherever and add the artwork to the album.

Optionally make a CD and create cover & playlist

You may wish to burn a CD from the WAV files. In which case you can use iTunes to print CD covers with track-list and album cover.
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Backup your updated iTunes library

This is a critical step you do not want to lose the valuable fruits of your labours, do you? We would recommend maintaining two separate backup copies of your library on external disks. Keep the WAV files that you exported from Audacity and back those up as well (two copies) on external disks.

Delete the Audacity project and exported WAV files to release hard disk space
After the backups are made you can then safely release space on your hard drive by deleting any Audacity project you created (delete both the .auip file and the _data folder with the same name) and deleting the originally exported WAV files.

Direct AAC export from Audacity

You may if you wish export to AAC compressed format (M4A files) from Audacity for direct import into iTunes. AAC export is one of the options available in the Export menus. To export to AAC, download and install the optional FFmpeg library. The export quality for M4A can be modified using the Options button. The highest quality Audacity setting is roughly comparable to encoding to AAC in iTunes using VBR encoding at the highest bit rate preset.

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