I’m doing a recording of me singing to a track I put onto Audacity. Teh picture is a screenshot of my computer and the track that says Swagger J is the music track and the Audio Track is my singing. i wanted to make theaudio track louder so its a little bit louder than the music. I tried to amplify it by clicking on it (selecting it) and goin to effect then amplify but it wont let me do it the aplify option isnt available. What should I do?
You may not get there, but you need to know that the tools only work after you press Stop. Pause isn’t enough.
Your choices are to make the music lower or to compress your voice louder.
Making the music lower is pretty simple. Select the music track and run Amplify with a negative value in Amplification. Repeat until the song sounds right. You can also use the volume slider to the left of the track, but that’s a little magic.
Making your voice louder is much more interesting. Amplify will only increase the loudness of the track until it is about to cause serious damage. Then it stops increasing. This usually happens at the clipping or overload point where the digital sound system “runs out of numbers” and causes harsh distortion.
You can try Effect > Compression.
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/compressor.html
This effect squeezes your voice louder and louder by increasing the quiet parts without affecting the loud ones. How much and how it does that is affected by all those settings. This effect causes intentional distortion. The voice before and after are no longer simply louder or softer versions of each other.
This is almost certainly the exact point that you will find out you’re not recording in a studio – and you’ll discover why the big kids do. Compression will also bring up the dog barking next door, the TV down the hall, and the computer fan noise. So the process of balancing the voice and music may depend on the Pomeranian the new couple in the cerulean blue house has.
Good luck.
Koz