Audacity Forum

Is there a way to do some recordings, just to learn (without messing up Audacity 1.3.11) before embarking on my real project? Hodge

We would kill to have more people do that. We always get the people who downloaded Audacity and walked straight into a four-hour recording. That's very important. And broken.

Do you have any way of getting sound into your computer? Built-in microphone? External microphone?

You can use piano2.wav and the Left-Right wav file from here as samples to get used to the filter and effects tools.

http://www.kozco.com/tech/soundtests.html

What is your eventual goal? Multi-track production of your band? PodCasts? Noodling around with your flute solos?

Koz

sure. push the record button. push the stop button. voila you have a recording. try it again with different mikes and inputs . play with the gain. play to your hearts content. add effects . delete the file if you dont want to keep it. you wont mess up anything .

Yes. I have plenty of prerecorded tapes to work with for testing my understanding. And my eventual goal is to be able to take edited .au segments from storage and mix them up in Audacity according what is wanted, then deliver them in MP3 format when necessary. Getting sound into the computer is easy, both for voice & music under, and I have a good mike and mixer, all fed in by USB. My only problem is to do all that without screwing up Audacity Hodge.

<<<And my eventual goal is to be able to take edited .au segments from storage and mix them up in Audacity according what is wanted>>>

That's a shaky start. Audacity doesn't save sound files. It saves Projects. Projects are a work-in-progress managed by the AUP file with segments in the _data folder and other files all over your computer -- sometimes thousands. That's why we tell people you can't move an Audacity Project. It's like trying to move a bag of flour after it spilled.

.au files are Audacity internal housekeeping files. They're not sound clips. Don't mess with them.

You can Export a real sound file, WAV, MP3 (with appropriate software), etc. Those are stand-alone music files and you can use those wherever you use sound files, here or on other computers.

Koz

The Au file format is a simple audio file format introduced by Sun Microsystems. The format was common on NeXT systems and on early Web pages. Originally it was headerless, being simply 8-bit µ-law-encoded data at an 8000 Hz sample rate.

I was under the impression that Linux used au instead of wav. But I see that outside of Audacities internal uses, au is not used for linearly encoded pcm at all. I'm a windows user. What do I know? As I read the post, I simply assumed the user had generated au files from another source. Don't go into the _data folders for any purpose other than trying to recover the data if Audacity crashes before you have saved your project.

In view of all of the above, could someone just tell me the specifics of how to achieve my
objective ?....... which is this: I have a need to deliver MP3s to potential clients. The clients will want short (up to 1MB) sound clips (voice/music/effects), strung together differently for each MP3. The sound sources are on a reel-to-reel stereo, but they all need editing (fade-ins, fade outs, level adjustments, voice added, etc). The R-R output is fed to a mixer for controlling levels; the mixer output goes to a USB interface, and its output goes to the computer and into Audacity.
In Audacity, I’lI need to do some editing, add voice, etc., but here is where trouble begins. I need to be sure how to identify the Project, Folder, and audio clips within, knowing I’ll need to store the edited audio clips somewhere so they can be retrieved later and assembled in Audacity in a certain order for clients.
So......... being a newbie and only vaguely familiar with Audacity...... let’s try working backwards just to gain the specifics. Consider this scenario: There are two clients, one who has an MP3 from me delivered a month ago with sound clips arranged a certain way, and the other client with an MP3 delivered yesterday but with a different arrangement of clips. The MP3 clips are much higher quality compared to the original R-R sound because of my work with Audacity.
HOW DID I ACHEIVE THIS ?
Hodge

I am just going to give you a very, very short answer.

You edited the wave files in Audacity, Labeled diff. selected parts of the wave files, and exported each selection separately, choosing to save each one as an mp3 file.

Since you are now using Audacity 1.3, I'd like to repeat the last part of the advice I just gave you in your post under Audacity 1.2 in case you are no longer looking in that section, which is to look at this link to understand how Audacity works:
http://manual.audacityteam.org/index.ph ... y_Projects

Hodge wrote:In view of all of the above, could someone just tell me the specifics of how to achieve my
objective ?.........
Hodge

copy the tape into audacity
export as wav
inport wav
slice and dice
save clips by identifiers so you can reuse them
think of "library"

then for the next mp3
access the clips you need and use them
tweak to suit and export a wav file
convert wav to mp3 using your favorite utility

if you process the wav clips them then save again with an expanded identifier -- i always start with raw and a date and a short meaningful name -- you may want to add location and other data --
later (when i save the next version) i may add compressed or normalised or whatever i did to it