Advanced Features

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Use sound to your advantage

Experiment to see how sound can:

  • Enhance the flow of your story, its overall structure and internal transitions
  • Build a landscape or a mood in the mind of the listener
  • Provide nuances to the personal significance of your story that the written word alone could not provide

Sample podcasts

Find free music and sounds

The BBC released 16,000 sounds for use under a CCL (select a category on the left, for example “South America” or do a search by term, such as “street” or “cafe”)

Audacity Toolbar

  • Selection – Select an entire track just one part of a single track; to select more than one track, hold down Shift while selecting; to edit one part of a track, Use Cut, Copy, Paste (icons to the right).  As you are editing, note that there is an undo arrow to the right
  • Zoom – View the wave form in more detail (useful when you want to edit out pauses, mouse clicks, or other errors, or if you want to move one part of a clip to another position in the recording)
    • Use the +/- magnifying icons to the right or simply click to zoom in and right-click to zoom out
  • Time Shift – Move a track to the left or right (in relation to another track above or below)
  • Envelope – Manually adjust the volume in selected parts of a single clip (fade in, out)

Audacity tutorials

Highlighted tutorials:

  • Auto-Duck
    • “This reduces (ducks) the volume of one or more selected tracks whenever the volume of a single unselected “control track” placed underneath reaches a particular threshold level. It can be used to create voice-overs…”
  • Mixing Voice with Background Music