I like to sing and record myself with karaoke tracks. Up until recently, I was using Cool Edit Pro with an old laptop. The laptop died etc.
Anyway, I’m learning how to use Audacity. When I record, it automatically makes a new track. How do I re-record just a part of my singing track? I tried it, and all it did was make a third track for that part. How do I replace it? I tried different things but nothing I tried worked, such as trying to move the third track part to the second track. Please help!
Also, I’m not very knowledgable about what things you can do to make the singing sound good, other than reverb. Does anyone else here use Audacity with singing, and if so, which effects do you generally use? I don’t have time to go through all the effects and figure out what they do, plus my ear is not so good when it comes to effects.
With CEP someone helped me, with instructions like these:
Click on effects at the top of toolbar. 2. Click on “Filters” and then click on “Parametric equalizer”. 3. At “Parametric equalizer”, scroll to and click on “Mackie High Boost”. Click ok. 4. Go back to effects at toolbar. 5. Go to “amplitude” and click on “dynamic processing” 6. Scroll to “real audio compander” and click on it. Click ok… 7. Go to effects again at toolbar. 8. Go amplitude click on “Dynamic processing”. 9, Scroll to “De-esser medium”, then click ok.
I’ll stop you there. You have an old version of Audacity. The current version is Audacity 2.3.0 and it is available via the Audacity website: Audacity ® | Download for Windows
I don’t think so. Audacity 2.3.0 doesn’t do that. Perhaps you have two versions of Audacity installed and you are running the old version. Look in “Help > About Audacity” to see the version number.
In that case, open Preferences (“Edit menu > Preferences”) and click on the “Recording” tab.
Third item from the top, “Record on a new track”.
That option is not ticked by default.
When not ticked, the default behaviour is to append each recording to the end of the same track, or “Shift + Record” to record to a new track.
When it IS ticked, the record button (or keyboard “R”) will record to a new track (“Shift + R” to append to the same track). https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/recording_preferences.html
Select the part that you want to replace (click and drag).
“Edit menu > Remove Special > Split Delete (Ctrl + Alt + K)” to remove that part and leave a gap.
Select from a bit before the gap, to a bit after the gap - allow enough lead in so that you can sing in-time with the rest of the song.
Start recording to a new track (either “R” or “Shift + R” depending on your preferences settings)
Recording should stop at the end of the selection, or press Space to stop
Once you have the recording on a new track, trim the ends as necessary, and if necessary use the Time Shift tool to adjust the position of the audio clips.
That’s it.
When you Export the finished recording, the tracks will be mixed together into a single audio file.
There are additional techniques for making the transitions smoother (see “crossfading” Creating a Crossfade - Audacity Manual) but the above steps cover the basics.