How to record, edit and manipulate audio

There are many reasons why you need to work with audio files. Perhaps you’re considering setting up a podcast, to distribute recordings of talks, lectures, presentations or sermons. You might want to give your website a bit more panache by adding some background audio. Or personal projects could benefit from a splash of audio. Recording interviews, maybe for school or university projects, or in conjunction with family history research, come to mind. So we’re going to see how to record and edit audio using the free open source Audacity software.

Unless you’re editing audio that someone else has recorded, you won’t be able to do anything until you’ve made a recording and so this is an obvious place to start. So, assuming you’re going to be using an external microphone – and you really didn’t ought to use an internal laptop microphone – begin by plugging your microphone into your PC.

Now we can turn to Audacity and, first of all, be sure to select either Mono or Stereo, as appropriate, using the menu in the Device Toolbar. For recording speech, as opposed to music, you’ll usually be using mono. In fact, a PC’s 3.5mm microphone socket only supports a mono signal, although some USB devices support stereo. Now you should set up the microphone level before you start to make the real recording. Note that this can often be adjusted both in your operating system and in Audacity but, in most cases, changing the level in Audacity will actually alter the system setting so it’ll be easier to just use the slider in Audacity.

Now, talk to yourself (what’s new? – Ed) into the microphone or, if you’re going to be