Book Image

Getting started with Audacity 1.3

Book Image

Getting started with Audacity 1.3

Overview of this book

Using the Audacity software as the starting off point, we discuss what the software is, what it can do, how you can use it, and where you go to get started installing it. All of this information is grounded in some basic audio editing terminology and background for those that aren't so technology inclined.Then we'll start digging into a sample project! You'll learn about how to set up a project, create a voice track, record an interview with Skype, and basic audio editing techniques. All of this done in an easy to follow, task based approach with lots of examples. Here, we plan to go a step further, we teach how to wrap all of these steps together and create a podcast that can be posted on your own website or blog.There's always more you can do with Audacity! The last portion of the book is dedicated to just that - discussing more advanced editing and mixing techniques, using affects, adding music, adding additional plug-ins to the software. All still incorporating examples and easy to follow tasks you can try on your own audio projects.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Getting started with Audacity 1.3
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
9
Giving Your Audio Some Depth: Applying Effects
Toolbar, Menu, and Keyboard Shortcut Reference
Glossary of Terms
Index

Podcast formats


Podcasts can be in any number of audio formats—as long as someone can listen to it on their computer or handheld audio device. But, by far, the most common podcast format is MP3. This is a compressed file format. Compressed formats mean that the quality of the recorded audio is lowered in order to make the file size smaller, but the lost quality won't be noticeable by most people. Also, in this case, it exports an audio file into a single file that is easy to share with others. We'll learn how to export in MP3 format, and discuss other formats that might be useful.

The term—or audio file extension—MP3 is short for MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3. At a very high level this is an audio compression standard used when exporting audio. The file sizes are small, and it is easy to send these files through e-mail, or post them on an Internet site for someone to download.

Compression means that all of the audio is combined and exported to a single file. The quality is reduced by using lower bitrates...