Audacity
Audacity is a free open source audio editing software program. The software allows you to record, play and edit sounds. Sound clips can be saved in many different file formats including AIFF and MP3.
Download Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
How Can Audacity be Used for Teaching?
Many faculty would like to use sound clips to enhance their courses. Examples include: spoken word audio clips such as speeches and poetry, clips of phrases for learning a foreign language, music clips for music history or theory, and class lectures recorded for students to listen to outside of class for review.
Using Audacity
Recording an audio clip: Many desktop and laptop computers include a microphone. However, if necessary, one can be purchased at your local computer, electronics or office supply store for around $15.
Recording and Saving an Audio Clip:
Audacity will allow you to record audio directly to your hard drive using the record button. Start by clicking the Audacity program icon on your desktop.
Once the program has opened, notice the large icons similar to controls on a tape or cd audio deck. You will see reverse, play, record, pause, stop and forward. Simply press the record (red dot) icon to start recording.
The program will start recording immediately and a new audio track (file) will be created. The audio track will be mono instead of stereo and a red cursor will scroll the track to denote the recording process and time. You will also see the wave form of the audio being recorded.
Press the stop icon (yellow square) to stop recording. To save your recorded file, in the program menu click on File and choose Export as MP3. This is a compressed high quality format that can easily be used on a website or in Blackboard. You may also export your file in WAV format. This would be preferable if you choose to create an audio CD that will be played in commercial CD players. Otherwise, choose the MP3 compressed format.
Extracting Clips from a CD using Real Player:
Audacity can not extract tracks from CDs, however, many free programs like Real Player can do this. Once the track is extracted and saved, it can then be opened and edited in Audacity. Start by opening Real Player and choosing Tools, CD, Save CD Tracks.
A "Save Tracks" window will open in Real Player allowing you to select the tracks on the CD you would like to extract and a file format for your extracted audio files.
>
To change the default location for saving files and the file format click on the Change Settings button. Unless you specifically need the uncompressed file format of WAV, which will be a large file and take up lots of hard drive space, choose the MP3 format. Click OK when your selections are done.
Once you have made your selections, you will see the Save Tracks window again. Select the tracks on the CD you would like to extract, confirm your settings and click the OK button.
You will now see the Real Player main program window again with the Music and My Library tab selected. The time remaining in extracting the track and status of the track are listed.
Opening and Editing an Audio Clip:
Once the track is saved by Real Player, you can then open the track in Audacity by choosing File, Open.
By default, tracks extracted by Real Player will be in the My Music folder in My Documents (Windows). Double click the mp3 audio file to open it.
Audacity will import the MP3 file.
In this example, we will edit the clip to end at 2:15. To do this, with the I beam cursor selected, click in the audio clip at the desired location. Click and drag to select the portion that will be cut.
Once the portion is selected, choose Edit and Cut from the file menu in the program. The selected area will be cut from the audio clip.
Once the audio clip is cut, you can also fade the last 5 seconds of the clip. Select the area to be faded with the mouse as before, then choose Effect, Fade Out from the file menu.
To save your edited sound clip, choose File, Export as MP3 from the file menu.
Be sure to give your edited file a different name than your original if you choose to keep the original file intact.
