Creating a Voice Recording with Audacity

Audacity is a free, open source and cross platform (works on Mac, Windows, and Linux) audio recorder and editor. Download the Audacity program from: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ along with the LAME MP3 encoder – (Allows Audacity to export MP3 files.)

Opening and Recording Audio After you have installed the program, you can open Audacity by going to Start All Programs  Audacity. A recording window opens (if a recording window does not open automatically, go to File New). Click on the recording button (the red circle) to start recording. To stop recording, click on the stop button (yellow square). To playback your recording, click the play button (button with green arrow).

Saving Audio Files To save your files, go to File and scroll down to “Export as MP3”. Type in a name and save it on your computer. A message may appear asking for the lame.dll file. If this happens, navigate to where you downloaded the file. Extract the lame.dll file. When the Edit ID Tags window appears ,select the OK button without making any changes. Close Audacity when you are finished. If you do not have any changes to save when closing out of Audacity click No when asked to save changes when exiting the program.

Editing Audio Files To edit a soundtrack, you can simply place your cursor and click and drag the section you want delete from the audio file. When the waveform is highlighted you can simply click the delete button to delete that section. You clean up audio or add different effects to it like cross fades, simply click on Effect then the filter you would like to apply to the soundtrack. You can duplicate tracks by click on Edit Duplicate. You can add new tracks to your audio project by clicking on TracksAdd Track.