How to Clean Up Audio with Audacity


(ROUGH TRANSCRIPT)

Hi everyone, and welcome to Tubetorial. I’m Lorraine Nepomuceno.

Today I want to show you a quick and easy way to clean up your audio clips. When you make voice or music recordings for podcasts or video tutorials, one of the biggest problems is usually the quality of your audio. Your microphone can pick up background noises- in my case, I have an airconditioner running, and there’s usually a hum that gets recorded. To clean up my sound, and filter out as much noise as I can, I use a nifty little program called Audacity. It’s Open Source- so it’s free- and there are versions for Windows, Linux and Mac OS. I’ll be showing you how I do it on my Mac.

To download Audacity, go to audacity.sourceforge.net. Here you can learn more about the application, and if you go to the Download page, you can select which platform you need to use Audacity on.

I’ve already got it installed on my Mac, so I’ll open it up- and let me show you how quick and easy this is. To start recording, I click the RECORD button up here, and just start speaking into my microphone. And now I want to clean this up.

First, I want to make a short selection of the area here, before I start speaking. Because I’m NOT speaking yet, this is mostly background noise. So I’ll select it, and go to the “Effect” menu. I’ll click on “Noise Removal”, and this window pops up, asking me to Get Noise Profile- which is what I just did. So I’ll click that button.

Now, I want to select the entire audio clip, and go BACK into the Noise Removal window. Now, I can choose how much noise I want filtered out. I like to go much less here, but you can use the Preview button to listen and see what you prefer. Then I click on “Remove Noise”- and Audacity does its work.

One more thing I like to do, since I’m already here, is normalize the audio, so that my voice doesn’t sound too sharp- with the entire clip selected, I simply click on “Normalize” in the Effect menu. I have a few options here, and can listen to a preview of what it’ll sound like with these selected or deselected. Then, I just click OK.

From here, I can export my audio as a WAV or MP3 file- and that’s it. As you can see, it’s really simple to use Audacity to clean up your Audio. You can get more details at the Audacity website– they have excellent documentation there, as well as a Wiki you can refer to in case you get confused about anything.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of Tubetorial. For more video tutorials, please visit us at Tubetorial.com


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3 Comments

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  1. Thank you for the tutorial!

    I just want to know, being new to sound editing, Is there anyway to seperate two sounds? e.g. two voices speaking seperately?

  2. Thanks for this tip! I’m just starting to make screencasts. This will be helpful. I tweeted. 🙂