Best tutorial?

Audacity 3 Help Forum macOS
1

Hi -
While I’m at it, now that I’ve edited a few podcasts and have some rudimentary skills, I’m wondering what you’d recommend for actually becoming decent at using Audacity! Is there a short course or set of tutorials that people really like?
Please direct me to an existing topic if this is gumming up the works.
Thanks!

2

There are no editing instructions for the same reason there are no manual videos. By the time you get a presentable production, the next Audacity version is issued and you have to start over. It’s a career move.

Almost all of the YouTube videos available are, as of April 19th at 10:34 AM, likely wrong. That’s when Audacity 3.0.2 came out. If you see an Audacity instruction video without a version number, run the other way.

You can make use of the forum itself. If you know in general the areas you want to study, hang out on those sections of the forum.

Even though the Official Forum Format is Users Helping Each Other (there is no Help Desk), in actual practice, there is a bunch of seasoned/experienced elves helping everybody else out of trouble and you can watch the process.

“I can’t record my podcast because Zoom won’t let me record both sides of the interview – Johnny Jumpup”
“Well, Johnny, Zoom has…”

And etc.

Best we can do. No chalkboard and stuffy classroom.

Koz

3

Your best reference is the manual: https://manual.audacityteam.org/
The manual is also available from the Audacity Help menu.

The front page of the manual has links to pages about almost everything in Audacity. When you are looking for something in the manual, start at the front page. Use your web browser search feature to search the front page, then follow the links.

Note also that the big image of Audacity on the front page of the manual can be clicked to find out about that part of Audacity (try it).

Other than that, the best way to learn is through trying things. Don’t be afraid to “play” with Audacity - playing is a great way of learning.

As you become more familiar with Audacity, visit this forum frequently and see if you can answer any of the questions that others are asking. Helping others is a great way to gain an in-depth understanding of Audacity and become an expert user.

4

In my experience, the best way to learn is to learn by doing:

I don’t know if others would agree, but for me the documentation for the individual commands for macros is lacking. One good way to learn Audacity would be to document these commands and the various nuances. You could submit proposed documentation right here on the forum.

5

I agree, but there’s a couple of things that get in the way of extending the documentation right now:

  1. Scripting commands are not yet “frozen”. Although it’s unlikely that there will be big changes affecting macros, there may well be some changes, particularly affecting external access to the commands from Python / Nyquist / etc.

  2. The main documentation page for the macros commands is largely generated automatically. This is good in that updates to commands will automatically update the documentation, but the weakness is that the documentation is rather sparse.

  3. There’s a lot of commands. To write detailed documentation for each of the commands would be a lot of work, and so far, no-one has stepped forward to take that on. Would you like to volunteer for the task?