OK, part four of this series on creating content and this is a tutorial on creating audio content using Audacity. Audio is, in my opinion, by far the quickest, easiest, and most useful way of creating content. It has a relatively high perceived value (compared to ebooks for example), it’s very quick to create (I bet I can talk faster than you can type!), it’s easily digestible (think iPods!) and is perfect for re-purposing existing content, whether your own or PLR.

Here’s the video, and below you’ll find the rest of this blog post if you’d rather read along than watch. (Plus you’ll also find all the links mentioned in the video below!)

Links

Download Audacity: Audacity

Download LAME MP3 encoder: LAME

Audacity Tutorial – Recording and editing audio content

Audacity is actually a very simple tool to use. First of all you’ll need a microphone, and I suggest a headset. The reasons being that they tend not to pick up as much background noise, like mouse clicks and key presses, as a desk mounted mic, and they give you more freedom to move your head without affecting the volume.

Once you have your mic plugged in, fire up Audacity and you should see a screen like this:

The main, grey, area of the screen is where the audio tracks will be, and at the top of the screen are the transport controls, meters and editing icons. Before we can start recording we need to adjust the settings so go Edit > Preferences and then click on Audio I/O in the preferences dialog. Select the recording device (whichever input you have plugged your microphone into) and select 1 (mono) channel since we are only recording with a single mic. Then select the File Formats tab and make sure that Make a copy of the file before editing is selected. That will prevent any accidents when working on imported files being unrecoverable.

Now we’re ready to record. Click the big red RECORD button on the transport bar and start talking. You should see the red bar on the microphone meter move, and a waveform start to appear on a new track. After a few seconds, click stop and you should see a new track like this:

The larger the waveform, the louder the recording so you can see in this example that there is a short period of near silence before I started talking, and it tapers off towards the end. This is quite typical and you can remove the silence by highlighting the section with the mouse, and hitting delete.

Fades in and out are quick and easy, again select a section with the mouse and then go to the Effect menu, selecting Fade In or Fade Out accordingly. When you’re ready to save, go File > Export As MP3. Choose a location and filename, and at this point you will be asked for the location of the LAME encoder (if this is the first time using the software).

Congratulations, you just created some audio content!

Tips for creating quality recordings

If you’re not used to speaking into a microphone, you’ll probably stutter and slip up a little. You’ll be tempted to stop and start again but try to fight the urge. As Russell Brunson says, Ready, Fire, Aim! You can easily edit out the mistakes, the coughs, and the dog barking when you’re done recording.

To make the mistakes easy to find, just click stop, then record again from where you left off. Audacity will put this new recording on a new track so you know every time you see a new track, the mistake is just before that on the previous track. Simply listen to hear exactly when the mistake appears, select with the mouse and hit delete. You can then copy and paste to fill in any gaps.

You can also use the same technique of using multiple tracks to add music and intros/outros to your recordings. Simply drag your new audio into the project and Audacity will automatically put it on a new track. Adjust the levels, fade in/out as necessary and export as MP3 when you’re happy.

Noise reduction

You’ll probably find that your recording has quite a lot of hiss and background noise, especially if you’re using a cheap microphone and the soundcard that came with your computer. Don’t worry, we can clean that up. Just make sure that you have a couple of seconds of recording where you aren’t speaking.

Select this section of ’silence’ with the mouse and go Effect > Noise Removal and then click on the Get Noise Profile button. Then select the entire track you want to clean up and go Effect > Noise Removal and this time click Remove Noise. You may want to experiment with where to position the slider for optimum performance, but the result should be a much ‘cleaner’ audio track.

Noise removal helps to get rid of unwanted hisses and buzzes

See – I told you creating audio was easy! In my next audio tutorial we’ll look at another method of creating audio products really easily over the phone, and in the next tutorial in this series I’ll show you how to create video content, just like the the video in these tutorials!