So you've been out filming and you've got some great footage you put on your
timeline and you've realized the audio quite isn't up to scratch and you want
to clean it up. You know the tools on Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro are pretty good but
you want something that is a little bit more powerful well I'm gonna show you in
today's video exactly what tool to use and best of all it's absolutely free.
I'm Marck Brown for Editors Keys and on this channel we give out loads of great tips
and tutorials just like this to show you how to get the best out of your video
but let's jump into the video and I'll show you exactly how audacity works okay
so first of all I'm gonna show you exactly where you can get audacity from
and the website you want to use is audacity team.org
and I'll make sure to put the link in the description below or around this
video so you basically want to hit this download audacity link here you can
download it for Windows for Mac or for PC sorry Windows Mac or for Linux if you
are using a Linux system as well it's quite handy to have I'm on a Mac so I'm
gonna click the audacity for Mac OS X or Mac OS and you basically want to go for
the top link here and this will be the main most up-to-date file do you want to
get for your Mac so I've already downloaded that and I've loaded a track
here already but I'm gonna give you a quick overview of audacity and how to
use it I'm gonna show you how you can remove
noise and if you want to record a podcast or let's say you want to record
an intro for your video this is how you can do it so first of all when you first
jump into audacity obviously you won't have a soundtrack here but you want to
make sure that you're checking your initial sort of setup procedure is
correct and you want to make sure that you have your microphone selected in our
case we're using the editors Keys studio series sl150 microphone which is a
broadcast grade USB microphone that's what I'm using right now that you can
hear me with and that's what I'm going to use in in audacity it's great cuz
it's USB so it goes straight in without any audio interface or anything like
that of course you can use any microphone and
you can you even use the built in microphone of your Mac or PC next year
you can check if you want to use stereo or mono if you're using a microphone
generally it and mono input and for the purposes of this I have to
use this tally stream audio capture so that you can hear my voice and the music
as I record but generally you may want to use your headphones or your monitors
speakers when you output so just make sure you've got those settings set up
correctly here i've already has a say drags a clip in and you can do that just
by clicking and dragging into the timeline we can go up here and go to
file import audio now once you've got some music in to play it - simply click
where you want to play aggressive space
there you go yeah here there that we've got a nice little sound bed now I want
to show you how to do if you're doing a podcast or an intro for a video you may
want to do a bit of voiceover so let's pretend we want to do a bit of an intro
to a podcast show yeah what we want to do is when we record so we're going to
get to the point that we want to start which is around here and then we're
gonna hit record but you notice what happens there it puts the sound right at
the end and we don't want that to happen so what you need to do let's go to the
point that you want to record and then you want to hold down the shift key
let's change okay so we're gonna hold down the shift key we're gonna press the
record button and then we'll start recording
welcome to the show I'm Marc Brown and in this podcast I'm gonna teach you
everything there is to know about audacity and how to get that's a vocals
an audio recording at home or in your studio so keep listening so they go I
recorded a quick intro there that was live so where you know it's not perfect
but if you want to play it back let's let's see what it sounded like without
the audio track and to do that just click the solo icon here and you can
hear just the bits that we wanted to record welcome to the show
I'm Marc Brown and in this podcast I'm gonna teach you everything there is to
know about there you go now if you want to hear it back with the music of course
just untick solo and it will play all of the tracks that you've got here
welcome to the show I'm Marc Brown and in this podcast I'm gonna teach you
everything there is to know about audacity so it sounds pretty good
already I mean we're using a good microphone so there's not a lot of
cleanup that would need to be done but let's just say we want to get rid of the
squeaky chair bit here at the start and the noise now how you do that it's quite
simple you hover over select the area and hit delete but you notice there that
it moved and we don't want it to move in our case so let's undo that we're gonna
undo Natalie and if you go to here sometimes you know you don't mind if it
deletes let's say you've got a podcast or an interview you may want it to
delete just save got lots of thumbs and hours and pauses of course you will want
that space to be gotten rid off completely and you want the whole
interview to match up and it's perfect for that but let's say you're doing a
song or you're doing an intro like I am you don't want this to move out of time
so the best thing you can do is go down to remove special and then you want to
split delete and you can see there that it's kept it in the same place but it's
removed that bit at the start so if we play that back
welcome to the show I'm Marc Brown and in you can see there that it's done the
right job now sometimes you can see here that this audio is very very loud so
I've already turned it down but you can change that on the side here so if we
play that you'll now see this audio super loud you want to make sure that
you're controlling your levels perfectly here and you can keep previewing that
and then you've got you know you've got a monitor bar at the top here so you
make sure you don't really want to go over - 6 dB
you want to keep it between set of 12 and 6 for you know optimal settings keep
an eye on that make sure it doesn't peak when you're recording now there are lots
of extra features in audacity you've got lots of effects up here you can fade in
you can fade out so let's say for example we actually want to fade in this
portion here where the intro was good go to effects which go to fade in you can
see there it's done a nice lot of fade in so let's play all of that back now
welcome to the show I'm Marc Brown and in this podcast there we go we've got a
nice little fade in there which works okay and you can use that at the end as
well let's say you want to fade out this portion here you would simply select
that go to effects and fade out and you can see there that we've got a nice
gentle fade there so that's how you do things like that next let's just say
you've got a little bit of noise and this is why audacity is quite powerful
I'm going to create a new project here it's we're gonna go file and new
that's create a new project and I'm gonna pull in this audio track here now
this is from one of our videos and we were recording in studio and we had a
different microphone to normal and also there was a radiator noise we had the
radiators on full blast because it was three degrees outside it's absolutely
freezing so let's listen back to this track
you can hear there there's a lot of noise in the background there before we
start I make a little mess up here listen to this okay so if okay so you've
got the hang of your film and you're editing your so there we go so what we
want to do here is we want to do a simple clean up really we want to get
rid of this background noise and to do that it's quite simple you select this
portion here this is a nice selection of noise so actually a little tip here is
when you come to record if you're recording in a room with quite a lot of
noise or you're out on the street just record some silence before you speak and
that will give you a nice noise profile so what we're going to do to get rid of
this noise is go to effect and then we're going to go to noise reduction and
then we're going to click get noise profile this profiles the noise and then
you can use this you can select all and then you can go back to noise reduction
and you can click OK I mean you can change these things but we're going to
do it automatically here notice how flat that goes there if we play that back
you'll notice all the noise is almost gone it's still a little bit there but
generally it's improved and that we listen back to the vocals you'll see
that it sounds much nicer this time okay so okay so you've got the hang of your
film and your edges so there we go that cleans it up and that's quite nice and
then let's say we want to start here let's clean this up now we've removed
the noise now we'd want to get this to a nice decent edited clip there we go
we've hit delete we've now got a nice audio clip with no noise in the
background no stars at the start okay so you've got the hang of your filming and
editing your there we go and that's how you do it now if you want to export the
great thing about audacity is there's lots of export options so you get a file
export you can export as an mp3 you can export as a WAV as an OGG there's lots
of different options there for mp3 you'll need to download another little
driver to make that happen but as you can see it's a very simple
and powerful tool I'm not going to go over absolute
everything because I think most of you want you know now how it works but if
you've got any questions let me know in the comments below if you're not sure
about how any of this works if you're completely new to audio recording please
leave me a question I love to answer your questions so please do that you've
got these you know these are basics of zoom functions where you can zoom in and
I'll zoom to the timeline or the basic sort of stuff that you've got in most
programs it's a very very simple editor it's very easy to use and it's free
so let me know if you're downloading it I think you're gonna enjoy it thanks for
watching so there you go there's a quick overview of audacity let me know what
you think of the program is it the first time you've heard about it is it the
first time that you've downloaded it to your Mac or PC please do let me know as
I'd love to hear from you and make sure you subscribe to this channel because we
have those our videos just like this one which help you get the best out of your
audio and video and make sure you hit that notification bell and you'll be
notified of new videos just like this thanks for watching I'm Mark Brown and
I'll see you in the next video
you