Tag Archives: Audacity

Radio Interview Production Workshop #13: The Home Stretch

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IMAG0252

And…we’re in the final stretch. You’ve added an intro and outro to your interview, so now you’re going to mix it down to one track. (For the previous installments begin here and then follow the links at the end of each installment.)

First, select each track that you want to include in the mix by Command-Clicking in the left hand area of the track (Command clicking allows you to select more than one track at once). The three left hand portions of the selected tracks will now be highlighted:

select tracks to mix

Now go to the top menu and click on Track—>Mix—>Mix and Render to New Track

What you’ll find is a new track at the bottom which is the amalgamation of the other tracks you’ve selected to mix:

aftermixing

There it is, your completed track!. Now all that remains to do is to export it into a convenient format for broadcast. Typically, that would be an MP3 file. So select the final mix track and then from the top menu, click on File—>Export—>Export Selected Audio. You’ll get a dialogue which allows you to rename the file and choose its destination on your computer. You’ll also see, at the bottom, a section which looks like this:

 

after export

Set the File Type to MP3 Files, Keep the Bit Rate Mode to Preset, the Quality to Extreme, the Variable Speed to Standard. For saving mono files such as the ones we’ve been working with, select Joint Stereo. If you have been working with stereo files then you would choose Stereo. Click on Save and you’ll be presented with one more screen which you can ignore and just click on OK.

And that’s it. You should have an MP3 file which will pay in iTunes or any other standard music player.

I know this has been a long and sometimes technical tour, but the more you play around with this, the more you will be excited by the possibilities. It’s really amazing what you can make of your raw material.

Sometime next week I will post a link where you can download this whole series as one file.

Over and Out!

 

 

Radio Interview Production Workshop #12: Laying Down The Tracks

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***

The train is rolling on. We’re now at the point where the text of your interview is basically finished. (For the previous installments begin here and then follow the links at the end of each installment.) Now you’re going to add some intro music and/or outro music by using a second track.

Before you do that, however, we’re going to even out the sound of the interview track by using the Compressor effect. Select the track (click in the left hand area of the track where it says Mono 44100 HZ or the like) and then select from the top menu Effect—>Compressor. You’ll see the following:

compressor

Ignore all the sliders and just click on OK. By simply doing this you’ll have done three valuable things:

1) All your red clipping areas will be toned down slightly so they are no longer clipping, and

2) Your sound levels will be smoothed out; that is, the relative distance between your high and low volumes will be lessened. This is particularly useful for situations with more than one voice or source, and

3) After the first two have been accomplished, your volumes throughout will be relatively increased to the maximum they can go without clipping. This process is called normalization.

I usually use the Compressor effect at this point even if I am not showing any clipping.

Now you’re ready to add your musical intro. You could conceivably just cut and paste a piece of music onto the beginning of your interview track, but it’s classier to have a separate track which will allow some overlap between the music and the interview, as if it were underscoring.

Let’s assume you have an mp3 file of music that you wish to use, or, for example, sound from an mp4 video from YouTube or the like. Your first job is to import that file into Audacity. So, select the file to Import by File—>Import—>Audio:

import

When the import is complete you’ll have a new track underneath your original interview track:

afterimporting.jpg

In this case, the track imported was in stereo, so we’ll change it to mono as we did before—by clicking on the black triangle (just right of where it says “music intro” in the photo above) and then clicking on “Split Stereo to Mono.” That will result in two identical mono tracks one of which you will delete by clicking on the “x” in the upper left hand corner of the track.

If you were to set the Play cursor to the beginning and click on Play you would now hear the music track and the interview track at the same time. If you only want to hear one track at a time, you can click on Solo on the left hand side of the track to make it the only track played (you’ll notice the other track is now grayed out instead of blue). Likewise, if you click on Mute on the left side, the track will become greyed out and quiet while the other track will remain active.

Typically, I like to have 20-40 seconds of music intro before the human voices come in, and then about twenty more seconds of music underneath the voices before I fade the music out. And on the tale end I like the music to fade up as I’m giving the closing credits and then take us out with the music fading out. So, how to do this?

To do this, we use the time-shifting cursor. It sounds much more magical than it really is. It’s just a cursor that moves things right and left. It’s in your toolbar above the tracks:

time shift

Normally, your cursor looks like the “I-beam” in the upper left hand corner above. We are going to change the cursor to the “time-shift” tool in the middle of the second row in the photo above.

Using this tool, I am going to pull the interview track to the right thirty seconds by clicking and dragging on the track. The result should be something like this:

shifted

So now, if we played both tracks, there would be 20 seconds of music by itself and then the interview and music together. Of course, the music would still be very loud and drown out the voices, so we have to lower the volume on the music when the voices come in. Fortunately, Audacity gives us a tool to do that fairly automatically called Auto Duck.

To use Auto Duck, we want to move the music track immediately above the interview track. ( It was difficult for me to get this right at first, because when I think of the “underscoring” metaphor, I think of music below. But in Audacity, the level of the interview track below controls the level of the music track above.) In order for this to happen correctly then, we must drag the music track to a position above the interview track. First, make sure you’re back to the I-beam cursor by clicking its icon on the toolbar. Next click in the left hand area of the music track right where it says Mono 44100 HZ, and drag it upwards above the other track. When you’re finished it should look like this:

after switching tracks

Now in order to “duck” the volume of the music wherever there is voice, you are going to select the music track (not the interview track under it) and then click on Effect—>Auto Duck. Ignore all the sliders and just click on OK. The result should be something like this:

afterautoduck.jpg

Notice that now the music volume is much lower above where the voice track is. You’ll probably want to take down the volume of the music even more which you can do with the Amplify effect, and then fade out the music over the next 20 seconds or so (you can then delete the rest of the music track).

For the outro, you go through a similar process: Import a track you wish to use, time shift it to the area at the end of the interview to the place where you want it to overlap the voice, and then use Auto Duck. Further correct with Amplify and Fade In, and then finally Fade Out as the music ends your piece.

This has been a lot, so save your work, and I promise tomorrow I’ll be back with how to make a final mix down to one track and then export your work. See you then.

The next installment is here: https://jackshalom.net/2018/11/10/radio-interview-production-workshop-13-the-home-stretch/

 

 

 

Radio Interview Production Workshop #11: Effective Effects

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By now you should have a rough cut of your interview, which is approximately the desired length of your final mix. In this installment we’re going to get into some more tools of Audacity which will allow you to refine your work further. (For the previous installments begin here and then follow the links at the end of each installment.)

In the top menu, you’ll see a menu item, Effects. If you click on it you’ll get a long list of choices:

effects

There is so much that can be done with Audacity, but the truth is, to produce interviews and spoken word broadcasts, you will only need to use a few of the pictured effects. Of course, afterwards you can play around with all kinds of special effects such as Echo, Reverb, Wahwah, and so on for fun, but we are just going to concentrate now on the indispensable effects that you would need in normal use: Fade Out, Fade In, Amplify, and Change Tempo.

When you click on most of the effects,  there will be some default settings. The defaults generally give a good result, so I don’t recommend messing around with those settings for now. The first ones we will look at are the Fade In and Fade Out effects. Suppose you have clapping or music at the end that you want to fade out; you simply highlight the section on the track from the point where you want the fade to start to the point at the end where you want the sound totally muted. Then simply click on Effect—>Fade Out. You’ll see that you can use the effect over the same area more than once if you like. Likewise, with Fade In: often you want to fade in the music leading into or out of an interview. To do this, simply highlight an area and then click on Effect—>Fade In. Also remember you can always undo an effect with the Edit—>Undo menu item.

Next, let’s look at Amplify. An uneven sound level is a very common problem, and if the volume in general is too high or too low throughout the audio track, or variable throughout the track, we will deal with that later with an effect called Compressor. The Amplify effect, however, is most useful really for small areas where you need to bump up or tone down the volume. Perhaps someone turned away from a mic for a moment, or there was a loud unwanted background noise.

If you click on Effect—>Amplify, you’ll see that there’s a little box that says Allow Clipping. You want to make sure that that box is not checked.

clipping

Clipping means that the volume has reached such a high level that the sound is going to become distorted. Most of us have experienced that distortion when, for example, we turn up the sound to maximum on inexpensive speakers. So we want to be careful when working with sound that we keep the volume within certain limits, so that the vocal frequencies are not clipped. There are two main ways that clipping can be introduced into a mix: 1) either during recording, the source is too close to the mic and the recording volume is set too high (in which case most recorders will flash a red warning signal) or 2) using the Amplify effect in editing  the volume is too high and so clipping occurs. By leaving the Allow clipping box unchecked, Audacity will prevent you from bumping up the volume too high.

How do you know if you’re clipping? Go to View—>Show clipping(on/off). Make sure there’s a check mark next to it. If not, click on it.

view clipping

If the recording or the editing has introduced clipping, you will see it represented by red lines in the waveform:

red clip lines

While a  little bit of clipping is not a disaster, in general, you certainly want to avoid adding more. We will learn how to handle extensive clipping in the next installment, but for now, we don’t want to add any more of it through injudicious use of Amplify.

Amplify, interestingly enough, not only is handy for bumping up the sound, but also for making the volume softer when it needs to be. Your main control, after you highlight the area you wish to change, will be the slider you see when you click on Effect—>Amplify. Moving the slider to the left will decrease the volume (shown as a negative number of decibels); moving it to the right will increase the volume (a positive number of decibels). The general rough rule of thumb is that every + or – 6dBs doubles (or halves) the perceived volume (it depends upon many factors including the frequency of the sound and human psychology.)

The final effect we’ll discuss is a very useful one named Change Tempo. If you look at the first picture above, you’ll notice two other similar sounding effects, Change Pitch and Change Speed. But those are not going to be of much use to us. Change Tempo does something very interesting. Within limits, it changes the duration of a selection without changing the pitch. If you think about it, normally if you speed up a recording it also starts making the voices sound like chipmunks. But the Change Tempo effect shortens duration without affecting the pitch of the voices. It does so by cleverly shortening the spaces between words. Practically what that means is that if you are fighting to cut the last few seconds from a track in order to get within your time constraints, you can do so using this effect.

Now, to be sure, you cannot shrink the time of your track by very much before it becomes noticeable; I find, however, that you can submit a 2-3% tempo change cleanly without any apparent difference in sound quality—and the elimination of those few seconds (say, about twenty seconds for a fifteen minute piece) may be just what you need to make your time limit.

So there you have the most effective effects you can apply to your track. Next time we’ll talk about adding more than one track so that you can have overlapping music, and we’ll also talk about how to prepare your final mix for export. See you next time.

The next installment is here: https://jackshalom.net/2018/11/09/radio-interview-production-workshop-12-laying-down-the-tracks/

 

Radio Interview Production Workshop #10: Sculpting Your Interview

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So now that you’ve had some time to play around with some of the basic functions of Audacity such as cutting, moving, copying and pasting, let’s take a closer look at the editing process, and some more tools and strategies which will save you time and energy. (For the previous installments, begin here and then follow the links at the end of each installment.)

The most important strategy in editing, in my opinion, is working from big to small. That is, cut away the big useless sections first, and then start working more precisely. Again, sculpting is a very useful metaphor here: think of chopping away big blocks of stone before you start doing any polishing. There’s really no sense in beginning by obsessively cutting out each “umm” or “err,” if  that whole portion of the conversation is going to be cut out anyway.

What should you be cutting? Generally, you want to be able to cut enough back so that the listener can sense a clear through line of the argument or intention. Of course this is going to vary vastly from speaker to speaker. But it’s not uncommon for a person to say something like:

“I owe my life to Jane. Jane was married to a guy named Saul who worked in a little candy store down by the Bowery. He was a tall guy who always wore plaid and never liked me. In fact he went out of his way to avoid me. Anyway, Jane was the one who taught me everything I know about poker playing. She taught me how to count cards and bet correctly…”

Now if you have the time, you can leave in the bit about Saul, but really (and the “Anyway,” is the big clue) it would be more clear and direct to edit it so it said,

“I owe my life to Jane…Jane was the one who taught me everything I know about poker playing, etc.”

It is also often the case that a guest will make a statement and support it, say, with three examples. Much of the time, you can cut out one or two of those examples.

“I was always a dreamy kid. I would sing to myself in school and the teachers would yell at me for making noise. Then at home I would lock myself in the bathroom for hours reading books. My parents were flabbergasted by that. And of course when I was sick I would pretend to be the star of my own variety series and use the bed as a stage.”

They’re all fun to hear about, but if you are fighting for time, it could look like this:

“I was always a dreamy kid…When I was sick I would pretend, etc.”

But sometimes the cuts need to be even more drastic, and need to be made based on what topic you are going to focus on. For example, I had a very interesting conversation with a woman who had written a book about the history of segregated schools in the US beginning with the Civil War. I had to make a decision to focus the edited version solely on twentieth century history, with just the briefest nod to the important 19th century era. Sometimes you will be sad about what you had to leave on the cutting room floor, but it is all about working within the constraints you have.

Let’s look more closely at what needs to be done in Audacity to achieve these edits. First we’ll take a look at what I call the “name area” of the track on the far left. There are a couple of important functions hidden away here. And also some buttons and sliders you don’t want to mess with:

name area

The top slider button marked -…+ will change the volume level during playback. Leave this slider alone; there will be times when you want to adjust the volume levels, but you don’t want to do it from here. Likewise, the slider directly beneath it changes the output to the left or right speaker. Again leave that slider in the middle. Instead start off by clicking on the inverted black triangle at the upper right hand corner of the name box. When you do, you should get something that looks like this:

Name Controls

First I will name the track, by clicking on “Name…” at the top and entering a track name. In my example, I call it “penny interview.”

title traack

Since in my example, I started with a stereo track, and I want to work with a mono track, I click on the inverted black triangle as before, and then click on the line towards the bottom that says “Split Stereo to Mono.” (If your track is already mono, you won’t need to do this.) You will now have two separate identical tracks. You are going to get rid of the bottom track by clicking on the “x” in the upper left-hand corner of the name area of the track. (Remember you can bring the track back again by “Undo”-ing the action by going to Edit—>Undo).

Okay, so let’s say now you’ve decided on a chunk of the track you’d like to delete. Highlight the selection by dragging over the area with your mouse. You can extend the selected area right or left by pointing the mouse at the very border of the selection and waiting until it turns into a finger-pointing hand icon, then clicking and dragging the border carefully with your mouse.

Once selected, you can listen to how the track would sound without the selected part by pressing the “c” on your keyboard. You will hear a few seconds of sound from before the selection and then a seamless cut to a few seconds after the selection. In other words, this is what your track would sound like after the selection is deleted. This allows you to adjust the borders before you do the deletion for the best cut.

To help you achieve accuracy, you should use the Zoom function, by clicking on the magnifying glass with the “+” inside.

zoom controls

The more you click, the more zoomed-in you will be. To zoom out again, click on the magnifying glass with the “-” inside it. Notice the time markers immediately above the zoomed in track cover a much shorter length of time now in one screen.You would have to scroll horizontally to see more of the track. For example, this zoomed-in track only covers 33 seconds:

zoom time

This is a lot, so just one more thing about editing for now: if you want an edit to sound natural, the general rule is to cut on the breath. That is, leave the person’s intake of breath before s/he speaks. So let’s say the original audio was: “The CEO was incredibly incompetent and incredibly stupid. What’s more, he was a drunk.” If you want to edit  out the phrase “and incredibly stupid,” make sure to leave in the breath before “What’s more.”

After you make your cuts, save and quit, and next time we’ll talk about adding other tracks to your interview for texture. See you then.

The next installment is here: https://jackshalom.net/2018/10/19/radio-interview-production-workshop-11-effective-effects/

 

Radio Interview Production Workshop #9: Navigating Audacity

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It’s great that you now have your interview file ready to be edited in Audacity. (For the previous installments begin here and then follow the links at the end of each installment.) Go to the project folder on the desktop, and double-click on the .aup file to open your project.

 

double track

 

The blue waveform is the sound of your file (if you recorded in mono you’ll have only one waveform or track, as it is called). If you click on the green arrow Play button in the toolbar above the waveform, you’ll hear your interview. The black square button will Stop the “tape,” and the double vertical line button will Pause and UnPause the tape. The black left arrow returns the cursor to the beginning of the track, and the right black arrow sends the cursor to the end of the track. The red button, which we will not use at all, is to record directly into the program.

 

controls

 

Click on the green Play button and you can watch the cursor move along the waveform as your interview progresses. Click the Pause button to pause the sound, then click it again to re-start the sound from where you left off. Then press Stop, which moves the cursor back to where you started at the beginning.  If you now click the mouse anywhere within the waveform while it is stopped, the cursor will move to that part of the track; so if you now click Play again, the track will start playing from that new cursor position. If you click Stop, then clicking either the black left arrow or the right arrow will move the cursor position to either end.

Play around with these controls for a bit to get a feel for them. They’re really no different from what you would find on a CD player or in iTunes.

If you are conversant with any of the common word processing programs like Microsoft Word, you are already familiar with the way the basic functions of Audacity work.

Think of the blue waveform as the text of your document. Just as in a Word document, you can cut, delete, copy,  and paste. Just as in a Word document, you can also do multiple undos and re-dos. It’s nice to know that you can undo any step that you’ve done, so let’s learn that first!

Click your mouse somewhere in the middle of your blue waveform. Now hold down the mouse button and drag over the wave form a bit, just as you would over a portion of text in Word in order to highlight and select it. (To deselect a portion of the waveform, simply click anywhere within the waveform.)

highlight

If you hit the space bar while a portion is selected, the program will Play the audio within the selected portion. Hit the space bar again or the Stop button to stop the audio.

You can now perform one of the basic editing functions on that selected sound. Let’s try Deleting that selected portion (don’t worry, we’ll bring it back in a moment). Simply press the delete button on your keyboard, and your selected audio is gone—the waveform no longer shows that piece of audio, but the rest of the audio remains untouched. It’s just as if you had snipped a piece of tape from a tape reel and spliced together the remaining ends.

Let’s bring back the deleted part now. Click on the top Audacity Edit menu, and then click on the top line of the submenu to Undo your Delete.

undo

You’ll see your selection is back in your waveform, highlighted.

Now let’s try moving a piece of audio from one place to the other. Select a piece of audio by clicking in the wave form, holding your mouse button down and dragging it a short distance to highlight a section of audio. Then click on Edit—>Cut. Your highlighted section will be deleted, but the contents of the section are now stored in your Paste buffer. Move the cursor to a new place in the waveform—say, by clicking the mouse at the beginning. Now click on Edit—>Paste, and you’ll find you have pasted the selected audio into its new cursor position.  If you begin the player now from the beginning, you’ll hear the selected part which has been moved from the middle to the beginning.

Now, let’s Undo that by clicking on Edit—> Undo. You can undo (and redo) multiple times as long as you do not save your work. Once you save the file, the buffer is cleared out and you cannot go back to a prior step.

Okay, one last function we’ll look at, the Copy function. Just as in a text document, sometimes you want to repeat a selection. For example, it can come in handy when you want to lengthen a silence. So, select a portion of audio, and then go to Edit—>Copy. Your selected audio will still be there, but a copy of it is now in the Paste buffer. Click in the waveform to where you would like the copy to appear—let’s say, this time, right after the selected audio.  Click on Edit—>Paste. You’ll now have a copy of the selected audio at the cursor, but the original selection will still be in its original place.

And…let’s Undo that again by going to Edit—> Undo, and you should be back to where you started from at the very beginning.

Remember, even if you screw up somehow and the Undo isn’t working for you, your original recorded file is still sitting in your project folder. If need be, you can always start off from scratch by importing that file into a new Audacity project.

Play around with these functions for a while to convince yourself that you can recover if you make a mistake. It will give you the confidence to proceed further.

When you’re finished, go to File—>Save, and then quit the program with File—>Quit.

Next time, we’ll learn more about Audacity, and talk about some editing strategies. See you then.

The next installment is here: https://jackshalom.net/2018/10/03/radio-interview-production-workshop-10-editing-strategies/

Radio Interview Production Workshop #8: Dept. Of Ed(iting)

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You’ve finished the interview and you’re heaving a sigh of relief.  (For the previous installments begin here and then follow the links at the end of each installment.) Well, not really, because a thought occurs to you right away–did I capture everything? Was this thing a total mess? But once I know my interview was recorded properly (I’ll save the horror stories for another time) for me this is the most fun part of the process, the editing.

If it’s true of novel writing and playwriting that it’s all about the revision, then it’s at least as true in putting together an interview. It’s akin to sculpting. You’re chipping away at the non-essential to reveal the form within. If done well, the audience never knows about it. Of course, you are not here to deceive, but there is a satisfaction in knowing that you have made the guest and the interview sound even better than they actually were.

So let’s just take this step by step to start the editing process. The first thing I do is a little bit of organization on my laptop so that I don’t drive myself crazy. I create a new folder on my computer desktop and give it the project name. On the Mac, go to the top left menu of the Finder, click on File to get the dropdown menu, and then click on New Folder. I’ll abbreviate a direction like this as File—>New Folder. (There are equivalent commands for Windows machines, but I’m going to stick here to the Mac.) Rename the folder with your project name (on the Mac, to change a folder name, click once on the title of the folder, wait three seconds, then click again on the title of the folder). Once I have my project folder, I put all files for that project into this folder so that I will be able to find them and navigate to them easily later on.

So the first file you are going to put in there is going to be the recording of the interview you just did. It’s generally best to do a recording in a high quality format if possible, such as WAV or AIF, if your recorder allows it. Otherwise the most common format for audio files is MP3. You can tell which format your file is in by simply looking at the extension of your audio file. It should be something like 121017.wav or 180716.mp3, where the part after the period tells you what format it is in.

Most of the online services like freeconferencecall.com will only generate an mp3 file. The mp3 files, which are compressed files, have the advantage that they are a lot smaller than WAV or AIF files, but the trade-off is that the sound quality is not quite as good. Also, each time you edit and save them, you lose sound quality. That is why even though you may ultimately be required to broadcast an mp3 file (as is my situation) it is best if you can edit the interview as a WAV file, and convert it only later at the end to an mp3 file. (I’ll discuss in another installment how to do that conversion through Audacity.)

So let’s assume you have the interview file in your now titled folder on the desktop (by downloading it to your computer from the online conference service, or transferring  it from your digital recorder to the computer via a USB cord, and then dragging it into the new project folder). The first thing you want to do is get it into Audacity (see here for more about installing Audacity) so you can work with it. To do this, open Audacity and go to the top left menu. Then, click on File—>Import—>Audio. You will get a file selector dialog. Navigate to your project folder on the desktop, and click on the interview audio file you placed there earlier. When you do, you should get something that looks like this:

audacity 1

Notice in this picture there are two identical waveforms (the blue wavy stuff). That’s because this example was imported from a recorder that was recording in stereo. Ultimately, if you are in a similar situation to myself, you will end up broadcasting a mono file, which is a lot easier to work with when editing. If you were recording in mono in the first place, then you will only have one waveform, and you’re ahead of the game. Don’t worry about that now, though, we’ll deal with it later. Typically, a service like freeconferencecall.com only generates a mono track of your recording.

For now, that ‘s all we’re going to do. Next week, we’ll look at some of the basic functions of Audacity and how it’s going to improve your interview. So, go to File—>Save Project, in the chooser dialog, navigate to your project folder on the desktop, and in the “Save As” box change the name to your project name, but keep the .aup extension.

audacity2

Then hit “Save” in the lower right hand corner of the chooser box. You are now going to exit out of the program, so go to Audacity–>Quit Audacity.

What has this accomplished? Well now if you go to your desktop and look inside the project folder, you’ll see something like this:

audacity3

The bottom file, penny.WAV was my original interview file. When you import it into Audacity, the program makes a copy of the file, so that your original file remains untouched.

The top folder, penny arcade_data, like all data folders, you never touch. Audacity uses it internally. The next file, penny arcade.aup, is the way to get back to your Audacity work. If you click on it, the Audacity program will open up again and you will see your imported waveform again. So any file with an aup at the end means it will open up a waveform of something you’ve imported. Just like clicking on a docx file will open up a Word file, clicking on a aup file will open up an Audacity file.

Next time, we’ll talk about some of the basic editing commands and, very importantly, how to undo anything that you think might have been a mistake. See you then.

The next installment is here:

https://jackshalom.net/2018/09/18/radio-interview-production-workshop-9-navigating-audacity-essentials/

Radio Production Workshop #2: The Hope of Audacity

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audacity***

If you’ve gotten together your digital recorder, headphones, and microphone as recommended in last week’s post, you’re ready for the most important resource in putting together radio interviews for broadcast or podcast: an audio editing program for your computer.

In the old days, radio folk used to cut and splice reel-to-reel tape just as the old time film editors used to do.  But now, of course, with the wide availability of digital editors, the power to accomplish necessary tasks is so much easier. As I said last week, a good audio editor can help to forgive and solve a multitude of radio sins, and make your segment far more polished. A good audio editor can help you, at the minimum: 1) clean up background noise; 2) remove uninteresting portions of an interview; 3) re-structure the order of an interview; 4) remove verbal tics, hesitations, stumbles, and interruptions; 5) allow for mixing in intro and outros; 6) improve overall sound quality; 7) fit segments into predetermined time limits; 8) add underlying music and sound effects tracks; 9) convert from one digital format to another; 10) select the best parts from a group of different takes; 11) fade in and out, and smooth out contrasting volumes within a segment.

In short, an audio editor is to audio what a red pencil is to a draft of a manuscript. It is your way to revise, shape, and find out what the meaning of your piece is really about. There are many interviews I’ve done where I’ve been more proud of the work I’ve accomplished as an editor than with the actual interviewing itself. The audience will, of course, not see that part of the work, but to me, editing is the most enjoyable and satisfying part of the process.

There are many audio editors on the market and some of them can be quite expensive. One of the most popular is Adobe’s Audition, which has a very clean and intuitive interface, and does just about everything that you would want such a program to do. The problem with Audition, however, is its cost.  Adobe has moved to a vampire squid-sucking rental model for its headline products such as Photoshop, Audition, and Premiere Pro. That is, you can no longer buy these products outright, but you pay a monthly fee for their use. In the case of Audition, the cost is $240 a year.

Yes, it’s ridiculous. If you happen to have access to a computer that uses it, fine. But otherwise, you’ll want another solution.

It’s a little tricky, because some of the other commercial sound editing and mixing software programs do not necessarily have the functionality you’ll need for producing radio. Some software programs, instead, are more oriented to producing and mixing music tracks.

Fortunately, there is a wonderful open source program called Audacity, which is free and available for both Mac and Windows computers. It is truly a great gift from the software programmers who have designed it, coded it, and kept it up to date. The trade off is that the interface is somewhat less intuitive than say, Audition, but if you can use a word processor like Microsoft Word on a computer, then you should be able to learn the basic functions you’ll need on Audacity fairly quickly. And once you do learn those functions, you’ll find that if you wish to explore it further, Audacity has more features and power than even many commercial programs.

Audacity is constantly being updated, so it is important to download the most recent release for your particular computer. The official download page is here:

https://www.audacityteam.org/

As of this writing, the latest version of Audacity is 2.2.2 for both Windows and Mac computers. If you have either kind of computer made within the last 10 years, that’s the version you want, unless you see a later version posted after this was written. It’s easy enough to click on the download and install it onto your computer.

The one annoying part about installing Audacity is that due to patent issues, there are two separate small support programs that you should also download in addition to Audacity, which are not included in the Audacity program itself. These support programs will allow you to import, export, and convert from one digital format to another easily within Audacity. You won’t need their functionality until you need them, and then you’ll be glad you have them; so although they are a bit of a pain to configure, it’s best to do it now, once, and you’ll never have to be bothered with it again.

The two support programs you need are called LAME MP3 encoder and FFmpeg import/export library.

Once you’ve downloaded the main Audacity program, you can download and install those two support programs by following the directions on the following page of the Audacity online manual:

https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/faq_installation_and_plug_ins.html#lame

Focus on the sections entitled “How do I download and install the LAME MP3 encoder?” and “How do I download and install the FFmpeg import/export library?” Follow the directions there, depending on what kind of computer you have. When you get to it, follow the directions that say “Recommended installer package.”

In future posts, I’ll talk about how to use Audacity, but now that you have all your tools, in the next post of the series, next week, I’ll be talking about how to begin preparing for an interview. See you then.

The next installment is here.