Attack of the Pod Penguins 4: Edits in Audacity

Now that you have Audacity set up, grab our real podcast audio clips and try some hands-on edits.

By Tony Steidler-Dennison, LinuxWorld.com, 11/01/06

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As you've seen in the previous installments of this series, Audacity is a robust tool for capturing the audio for your podcast. We haven't really scratched the surface of the tool, but you're already more than familiar enough to start putting it to practical use.

If you've followed along closely, you've already set up the Audacity environment to suit your individual podcast needs. By working through those preferences, you've also picked up a useful tip or two about audio theory. You'll get more of those as we go along - more than enough to use Audacity in a way that will help you produce the highest quality podcast possible.

But for all that knowledge, we haven't really begun to dig into the utility of Audacity. We'll do just that in this installment, with a detailed look at Audacity's ability to edit and save your audio. It's the last detailed look we'll take at Audacity before moving on to other great open source tools for podcasting.

Let's start by importing an existing audio file. I've included a sample file to use as an example. With the file saved to your hard drive, let's import it into the Audacity program.

Sample MP3 file

Project -> Import Audio

Note that the Audacity interface will allow import of several audio file types, including WAV, MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. These cover the most popular open and proprietary formats. Our example is an MP3 file. From the selection window, select the location on your drive to which you saved the file, then select the file and click OK.

When the file is imported into the Audacity interface, you'll see a visual representation in the editing window, by default in blue. Remember that this visual representation displays the amplitude of the file, not the actual frequencies or frequency range. Let's take a look at the elements of the editing window in which you now see the sample file.

To the far left edge of the file wave representation is information about the file, including the sampling rate, stereo/mono format and sampling bit width. The window also offers some options for full file adjustment, including Mute, Solo, volume, and pan. Mute suppresses the file when mixed with other files. Solo supresses or mutes any other files that may be included in the mix. Volume controls the overall volume (amplitude) level of the file. And pan shifts the audio emphasis between right and left channels. Of course, panning affects the stereo placement of an audio element in the final file. A pure unaltered mono signal (that is, where all elements are mono sources and panning remains unaltered) will always represent an equal balance of left and right, presenting the audio dead center in the mix. Panning within a stereo file will shift the imaging of the mono element or elements, bringing them off-center. In a podcast that's primarily spoken word, say a forum-type format, panning can be used to accurately represent a different physical location for each speaker in a final stereo file.

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