It’s not hard.
All you need to do is select “Export Audio” from the File menu rather than “Save” and follow the on-screen prompts. Specifically, this is what you would do if Audacity has default settings:
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- File menu > Export Audio
The “Export Dialog” window opens. This is where you tell Audacity where to put the exported file, what file name to give it, and what audio file format to use.
We will put the exported file into your “Music” folder. We will call the exported file “test1.wav” and we shall export it as a WAV file.
The export dialog looks something like this:
2) Next we need to tell Audacity where to put the file “test1.wav”. We will put the file into the “Music” folder. I think that on Windows 7 you will find this folder in the “Libraries” section. if you can’t find the “Music” folder, stop at this point and ask - I’m sure one of the Windows guys will be able to tell you exactly how to find it.
3) Next, type in the file name “test1.wav” (without the quotes) into the “File name” box.
There are some important rules about naming files.
File names usually have two parts - the name itself (in this case “test1”) and the “file name extension” (in this case “wav”). The two parts are separated by a dot.
The file name extension tells Windows programs what sort of file to expect. We are going to make a “WAV” file, so we will add the file extension “wav”. Usually you don’t need to add the file extension, but so long as you use the right file extension, it is safe to do so, so in this example we will.
The file “name” and the file “extension” are separated by a dot (“.”). This is the only place you should use a dot in the name.
By default, Windows hides the file extension of some types of file. In my opinion this was a terrible decision on the part of Microsoft, utterly stupid. I presume they did it to make things more simple, but in reality it just makes file names harder to understand.
Some characters are not allowed by Windows. The simplest way to avoid trouble is to use these characters only and no others:
letters (a-z A-Z), numbers (0-9), space (" “), underscore (”_").
Do not use any punctuation characters or any other “special” characters. Stick to the simple rule “letters, numbers, space, underscore” and you will never have a problem with file names.
4) Finally we need to tell Audacity what sort of audio file to make.
“WAV” is always a safe choice because virtually all programs understand WAV files. To give it its full name, we will export as “WAV (Microsoft) signed 16-bit PCM”. This is the default for Audacity, but if you have changed it, select from the “Save as type” dropdown list the option that says “WAV (Microsoft) signed 16-bit PCM”.
That’s the hard bit done.
- Click the “Save” button.
Next up comes the “Metadata Editor”. This allows you to add “tags” to the file. Most programs can’t read tags from WAV files, so we can ignore the Metadata Editor by accepting the defaults.
- In the “Metadata Editor”, click the “OK” button.
That’s it. All done. Audacity now exports your project as a WAV file. More specifically, in this example it exports you project a a 16-bit WAV file with the name “test1.wav” into your “Music” folder.
When Audacity has finished exporting, if you use the computer’s file browser to look in the “Music” folder, you should find a file called “test1” (Windows has probably hidden the file extension so you can’t see the “.wav” part of the file name).