subject: Information Products - Audio Editing Basics [print this page] So you want to try your hand at editing your own audio
The first thing is to get some audio editing software. You can download a copy of Audacity for free off the Internet (legitimately, by the way - it's free software - just do a search with the words "Audacity free audio software").
Its not the best audio editing software in the world, but you cant beat free, right?
Audio editing software generally comes in two flavors stereo and multichannel (also called multitrack). A stereo editor is more limiting because you can only work with two channels of audio at any given time: left and right, while a multitrack editor lets you add as many tracks as you need. For example, you could add one track for your voice, another track for a voiceover person, one for music and yet another for sound effects. Each track can be edited separately and can have its own settings.
Once you have your software, the next thing is to get your audio into the computer. You can either record your content directly into the program (youll need to connect a microphone to your computer to do this) or you can import your recordings that were recorded on another machine. These days, most recorders are USB compatible and they appear as an external drive when you connect them to your computer. Its just a matter of connecting a USB cable and dragging the files into your computer. After thats done, just use the open command in the file menu of your software to open your audio files.
Even though there are a bunch of intimidating-looking controls, just think of this as a word processor for audio. It works basically the same way you can cut, copy, paste and rearrange things as you see fit. Most of what people do when they are editing audio is removing things that shouldnt be there from clicks, pops, burps, coughs and other unwanted noises, to whole sections of content that may not be relevant. For example, if its a live seminar, there may be all sorts of logistics information that mattered to participants at the time, but isnt relevant at all to an info product like the location of the bathrooms to how to get parking validated to what time the lunch breaks were happening.
In an audio editing program, what youre looking at is amplitude over time. In other words, the volume of the signal as time goes by. The display is left to right with the start of the recording on the left of the screen and the end on the right. Selecting and deleting audio is really very simple. You drag over it with your mouse and hit the delete key. In some programs, that will leave a space that needs to be closed up by moving the remaining audio to the left, while in other programs (like Audacity), the space is closed up automatically.
Other things you can do while editing is boost or cut volume, take out specific frequencies using equalization, fade audio in and out (music, for example) and mix things together.
When youre done with your edits, you can save the file and/or export your mix in variety of different formats.
