Audacity Forum

Hi there,
I am very, very new to all this and came across this product as I have to do a project for work which involves a pretend radio interview.
I recorded the interview on my phone and it is a .pcm file.
On the PC, I imported the RAW data in Audacity and changed the speed until it sounded right! I have also got rid of silent bits at the beginning and end of the file - so far so good!
What I need to do now is insert the sound of a phone ringing into the file. Part of it needs to be inserted between 2 bits of speech, part of it needs to be at the same time as another bit of speech. I have the phone ringing sound as an MP3 file, How do I do all this?

Thanks in advance,

Mike

mmarks wrote:I am very, very new to all this and came across this product as I have to do a project for work which involves a pretend radio interview.
I recorded the interview on my phone and it is a .pcm file.
On the PC, I imported the RAW data in Audacity and changed the speed until it sounded right! I have also got rid of silent bits at the beginning and end of the file - so far so good!

It would be unusual (and really, wrong) for a file to have a .pcm extension. If it has a .WAV extension you could try File > Import > Audio rather than > Raw Data. Most smartphones recording WAV files though will record a compressed WAV file (or a compressed codec inside a WAV container) and Import > Audio may have a problem with that. Is that why you used import raw data?

mmarks wrote:What I need to do now is insert the sound of a phone ringing into the file. Part of it needs to be inserted between 2 bits of speech, part of it needs to be at the same time as another bit of speech. I have the phone ringing sound as an MP3 file, How do I do all this?

File > Import > Audio the MP3. It will be on a new track, already selected. Edit > Copy to put it on the Audacity clipboard. Click in the interview track where you want to insert the ringing and Edit > Paste. Press F5 to select Time Shift Tool. Click above the mute/solo buttons in the phone ring track to select it, then click and drag rightwards in the waveform until the track is underneath the bit of speech you want. The interview and ring tracks will be mixed together automatically when you export as another audio file.

Hit the green Play button to hear what it sounds like where the two tracks play together. You should also watch the Meter Toolbar to see if the red clipping light comes on at the far right of the green playback bars. It may do because the combined volume of the two tracks will be too loud and make it distort. If you see the clipping light, reduce the -....+ gain slider on each track until you don't see the clipping light. If you want the same balance of loudness between the ring and the speech, reduce the gain slider on each track by the same amount.



Gale