I have had a lot of friends who have started to use Audacity, so I started to create YouTube videos for Audacity teaching users how to use the software, and how to accomplish certain tasks in the program. While these videos are mainly aimed towards beginner users, I am open to suggestions and questions for video ideas and I’ll try my best to answer any questions through a video tutorial if it’s a subject I have not covered. I have been using Audacity for a long time now and am very familiar with it.
If you’d like to see my playlist of Audacity tutorials click the link below. Thank you, and I hope this helps many of you.
Which Audacity is that? We get people posting on the forum all the time claiming intimate knowledge of an Audacity that hasn’t been current in years. The current Audacity 2.1.0 has greatly improved tools and look. The sound meters for one, are much larger and easier to see and use.
There are a number of errors we would just as soon you didn’t publish. For one example, the Audacity Project file format is nothing like the one in Photoshop and is a lot more complex than you suggest. This one point burns people constantly and results in lost or damaged shows.
And “Aye, there’s the rub” t’interweb has scores of video tutorials which well meaning folk create at some point in time and then never bother to update them when Audacity changes.
I can understand why, as to do so would be jolly hard work. It’s one of the key reasons that we on the Audacity documentation and support team decided long ago that we didn’t have the manpower (and we’re talking about a very small handful of part-time volunteers) for such video maintenance - it’s hard enough keeping the written Manual up to date with Audacity changes.
High quality video tutorials are always welcome as many of the YouTube tutorials are either very old (obsolete versions of Audacity) or full of inaccuracies / errors. As you can probably imagine, incorrect or out of date “instructions” can cause a lot of problems for users, and often end up with a confused on the virtual doorstep of this forum.
I’ve only had a quick look at the first of your tutorials, and there’s a lot that I like, but there are a few problems that stood out immediately to me (as an Audacity support person):
It is not clear which version of Audacity you are using. Audacity is developing, very rapidly at times. We update the manual for every released version to ensure that the information is accurate for the current release version. As you can no doubt imagine, this requires a lot of time and a huge amount of effort from the documentation volunteers, but it is obviously of vital importance to end users.
I like that you made clear the distinction between saving a “project” (which only Audacity can play) and exporting an normal audio file that can be played in other programs, however, from your video I was left with the impression that an Audacity project is a “file”. An Audacity project is NOT just a file. The .AUP file only contains instructions for Audacity, it does not contain any audio data because the audio data is separate (see: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/audacity_projects.html). This is a really important point because it is vitally important that if someone saves a project, they must ensure that the audio data remains available or the project will be destroyed.
Audacity supports Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. As a Linux user myself it stood out like a sore thumb that you failed to even mention Linux (see around 2:50 of your first video). I’m not saying that you need to give detailed instructions for all platforms (though that would be nice, if you have the expertise to do so). It’s perfectly OK for you to only provide instructions for one specific platform (such as Audacity 2.1.0 on Windows 7 SP1), but it should be clear to your viewers what software version and what operating system you are using, and should be clear that Audacity also supports other platforms and that on other platforms there may be slight differences. As far as possible we do try to keep Audacity the same on all platforms, but there will always be some differences (for example Mac OS X uses a “COMMAND” key where Windows and Linux use the “CTRL” key).
I know that MP3 is a very popular format and may be necessary for some portable media players, but it has many shortcomings and should not usually be the first choice of export format. When showing people how to export audio files, they need to be able to decide which export format to use. Very often, MP3 is not the best choice, but your video gives the impression that they “should” chose MP3 format.
In the current version of Audacity, if you install LAME according to the instructions in the manual, it is not normally necessary to manually navigate to the location of lame.dll because Audacity will (usually) find it automatically. By far the most common reason for Audacity not finding LAME automatically is because the installation instructions have not been followed.
I don’t have time to go through your other videos, but I hope that you find these comments constructive.
Thank you all for the feedback and the Audacity that I am using for my videos is 2.0.2 I will be downloading the newer versions right now as I did not know 2.1 was out. Thanks again, and I’ll see what more videos I can create with the feedback that you have given me in consideration.
