Audacity 3
Final Audacity Lesson
In This Lesson:
- Be your own A Capella group.
- Be the Lead Singer in a song.
- Use audio tracks in PowerPoint.
- Get your own podcasting website
- Changing a song’s speed but not its pitch (to hear the right notes).
- Use the special audio effects.
And more …
Be Your Own A Capella Singing Group
If you can sing at different vocal levels, you can record your voice and be your own singing group. First of all, put on your headphones (or your earphones and plug in your microphone) open an mp3 song in Windows Media Player or another media player. Don’t start playing it yet. Minimize your Media Player’s window. Look up the lyrics online (remember that you can do a Google (www.google.com) search on them – type lyrics and follow it by the name of the song). Either print them out to look at while you sing, or copy and paste them into a text document (reduce the size of the window with the lyrics so it only takes up a portion of your computer screen).
Now open up Audacity. Reduce the size of the Audacity window so that it’s next to the text document that has your lyrics (if you haven’t printed the lyrics out). On your Taskbar, click on the name of the Media Player on your Taskbar to pop it up. Click on the Media Player’s play button and then reduce it again. Click on the round red record button on Audacity to 
get the recording started. When the musical introduction has finished, join the vocalist(s) in singing the song.
At the end of the song, click on the square yellow button on Audacity to finish your recording.
Repeat this several times, returning to the start every time, changing your voice a little. Edit your file. You can remove breaths without changing the pace of the song if you select where you took a breath, then choose Generate, Silence, OK.
Save your file. You can export it (File, Export) as a wav or mp3 file, if you want.
Here’s one that I played around with (done to the tune of This Magic Moment, by Jay and the Americans).
Become the Lead Vocalist in a Song
Steps to Reduce the Vocals on a Song (and eliminating them, if you’re lucky).
Select down arrow on the left side of the audio track.
Select split stereo track. This MUST be in stereo to remove the vocals. The track splits into completely separate tracks. You have to do this to be able to affect one without affecting the other one.
Set both tracks to mono.
The bottom track is the Right track. Select it (click in grey area at beginning). Select Effect, Invert.
Check to see that it has removed the vocals.
If not, save them as one track. Select Effect, Amplify.
Make it negative to make it softer. This will make it lose data on the softest part, which should be the reduced vocals. Then amplify the whole track again to override those parts.
Note:
How well this works depends on where the vocals are positioned in the stereo field and their precise frequency content compared to the rest of the audio. So, unless you happen to be in possession of the original multi-track recordings, there is no universal way of doing this.
Song before vocals removed
Heroes and Villains before vocal replacement
Song after vocals removed and I became the main singer (Look out!)
Heroes and Villains after vocal replacement
How to Separate the Vocals from a Track
To do this, you must have two separate audio sources of a song, one with only the instrumentals and one with vocals included. The two sources of audio must be identical as far as quality.
Open one of the audio sources and then use Project, Import Audio to add the other audio file.
Line up the peaks and valleys in multi-track view (this may take a while) until the song is hitting the same notes at the same time.
Select the instrumental only track by clicking on the grey area in front of the track. Select Effect, Invert.
The instrumental peaks become valleys and valleys become peaks.
IF you have perfectly aligned the tracks, they should cancel themselves out and you should hear only vocals.
File, Export as a wav or mp3 file.
Use your Audios and Songs in PowerPoint 2003
You can have your audio files start playing in PowerPoint and go on however long that you want them to (default is stopping at the change of a slide).
Open PowerPoint and then open the presentation that you want your audio file to play in.
Select Insert, Movies and sounds, Sound from File.
Go to the folder that has your audio file and select it (it doesn’t have to be a music file). OK.
If you want your audio file to begin playing immediately, select Automatically. Otherwise, you can start it during a presentation by clicking on the little horn icon that appears on your slide (it appears in the center, but you can drag it to a different place).
Select Slide Show, Custom Animation. A Custom Animation Task Pane will appear on the right side of your presentation. Follow the steps in the picture below.
Get a Podcast Website for Free
Now that you have (hopefully) created a few mp3 files, you may want to share them with your family, friends or the rest of the world. Gcast is a website that hosts free podcasting. Go to www.gcast.com and look for the sign up link at the top right of the page.
Next, Gcast will take you through a series of steps to let you select a name and password to sign in. You will also get the chance to upload audio files that you have created. You can go back at any time and add more easily, too.
Audacity Effect Menu
The items in this menu only work when you have audio selected. Audacity does not have any real-time effects; you must select the audio, apply the effect, and then listen to the results.
Most effects have a Preview button. Clicking on this button plays up to three seconds of audio, allowing you to hear what it will sound like after the effect is applied. This is useful for fine-tuning the effect parameters.
Note – if the effect doesn’t come out as you’d like it, use Edit, Undo effect name to reverse it.
Repeat Last Effect – selecting this command is a shortcut to applying the most recent effect with the same settings. This is a convenient way to quickly apply the same effect to many different parts of a file.
Amplify – changes the volume of the selected audio. If you click the “Don’t allow clipping” checkbox, it won’t let you amplify so much that the audio ends up beyond the range of the waveform.
BassBoost – enhances the bass frequencies
Change Pitch – changes the pitch/frequency of the selected audio without changing the tempo. When you open the dialog, the starting frequency is set to Audacity’s best guess as to the frequency of the selection. This works well for recordings of singing or musical instruments without background noise. You can specify the pitch change in one of four different ways: musical note, semitones, frequency, or percent change.
Change Speed – changes the speed of the audio by resampling. Making the speed higher will also increase the pitch, and vice versa. This will change the length of the selection.
Change Tempo – changes the tempo (speed) of the audio without changing the pitch. This will change the length of the selection.
Click Removal – This effect is designed to remove the annoying clicks on recordings from vinyl records without damaging the rest of the audio. You can choose how sensitive the click detection is, and what the maximum length of a click is.
Compressor – compresses the dynamic range of the selection so that the loud parts are softer while keeping the volume of the soft parts the same. You can optionally apply gain, resulting in the entire piece having higher perceived volume.
Echo – very simple effect that repeats the selection with a decay, sounding like a series of echos. This effect does not change the length of the selection, so you may want to add silence to the end of the track before applying it (using the Generate Menu).
Equalization – Boost or reduce arbitrary frequencies. You can select one of a number of different curves designed to equalize the sound of some popular record players, or draw your own curve.
Fade In – fades the selection in linearly
Fade Out – fades the selection out linearly
FFT Filter – similar to Equalization, lets you enhance or reduce arbitrary frequencies. The curve here uses a linear scale for frequency.
Invert – Flips the waveform vertically, reversing its phase.
Noise Removal – This effect lets you clean up noise from a recording. First, select a small piece of audio that is silent except for the noise, select “Noise Removal”, and click on the “Get Noise Profile” button. Then select all of the audio you want filtered select “Noise Removal” again, and click the “Remove Noise” button. You can experiment with the slider to try to remove more or less noise. It is normal for Noise Removal to result in some distortion. It works best when the audio signal is much louder than the noise.
Normalize – allows you to correct for DC offset (a vertical displacement of the track) and/or amplify such that the maximum amplitude is a fixed amount, -3 dB. It’s useful to normalize all of your tracks before mixing.
Nyquist Prompt – for advanced users only. Allows you to express arbitrary transormations using a powerful functional programming language. See the Nyquist section of the Audacity website for more information.
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).
Repeat – repeats the selection a certain number of times. This operation is quite fast and space-efficient, so it is practical to use it to create nearly-infinite loops.
Reverse – This effect reverses the selected audio temporally; after the effect the end of the audio will be heard first and the beginning last.
Wahwah – 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. Adjusts the phase of the left and right channels when given a stereo selection, so that the effect seems to travel across the speakers.
Any items which appear after these built-in effects are VST, Ladspa, or Nyquist plug-ins. It is possible for a poorly written plug-in to crash Audacity, so always save your work before using a plug-in effect.
From SourceForge: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/onlinehelp-1.2/menu_effect.htm
Slowing down a Song to Listen to its Specific Notes
Sometimes you may want to slow down a song so that you can hear its specific notes (this is a great help for musicians). Changing the speed, however, will also change the pitch. If you want to hear each note accurately, but slower so you can distinguish particular notes, select the area of track where you want to do this and select Effect, Change Tempo. This will let you changes the tempo (speed) of the audio without changing the pitch. Note: This will change the length of the selection.
Epilogue
That’s it. Just experiment, play and have fun with Audacity.
Please let me know how you have used Audacity.
teachingmania1@yahoo.com
I hope that this class was helpful to you.
- Kathleen DeLander
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