Audacity Forum

Hey guys, I know I am a newbie and I apologize if I wasted anyones time here, but I just downloaded Audacity. I want to use it to record a weekly Podcast for a online Football league I run. I use a USB mic, and I am trying to run I-Tunes in the background with Loops I made with my Adobe Soudbooth program. Anyway, I was under the impression the program Audacity records any sound my computer makes, and I was hoping I could just play my music in the background along with my talking. Apparently that is not the case.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I am running XP on a Dell computer.

You can do it like that, but there are easier/better ways of producing a high quality result.

Consider, for a moment - you have the music playing, you are on a roll with your patter, then just when you don't need it, you get tongue-tied and verbally trip up. This puts you off, you consider stopping and doing another take, but the last 2 minutes were perfect, and while this is bothering you, you loose the thread altogether and so you have to stop, rewind the iTunes track to the beginning and start again, with no guarantee that next time around you won't sneeze, get a tickle in your throat, or loose your track again.

So what's the alternative?

Open Audacity, and Import the background music track, then record your voice on another track. You can have as many "takes" as you like. You can even trim all the best bits, delete the mistake, and adjust the position of your good sound clips so that they flow smoothly from one to another. Once you have finished, you "Export" the finished show, which combines all the clips into a single WAV file, ready for burning on CD (your backup copy) and encoding as an MP3 (your finished podcast. Less stress, less mistakes, more time to think about exactly how you want it, and a professional sounding result.

See here for details of how to do it: http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... h_Audacity
Good luck with your Podcast.