Audacity Forum

I have a soundrecording (not from a phone call, but from a real-life face-to-face conversation with a person) which is an MP3-file (this was an AMR-file which a converted into a MP3-file with an MP3 converter). In this recording I have a conversation with a person (I will refer to this person as 'X' for easiness sake) in a public area. But when I went to listen to this recording afterwards on my computer, I noticed that there are moments at which I have difficulty hearing (not in the real-life consversation, but in the recording) what X is saying (who also has quite a soft voice unfortunately) and is also drowned out by a group of chatting people walking by.

Then I thought to myself: maybe I can find some programme with which I can drown out/filter out (?or isolate?) the voices of the chatting people and als amplify (or perhaps isolate?) the voice of person X. So I downloaded Audacity. But the thing is, I know little about computers and have never used a programme before like Audacity. I tried to read the tutorials online, sorry, but I don't understand any of it (to me, it comes across as if it is written for people who have (quite) a bit of experience and not for a complete novice like me). And another issue is that my Audacity programme is not in English and those tutorials are for 99% in English -> I don't know which menu-option to chooese in my language. When downloading Audacity, you can (theoretically...) choose the language, I selected 'English' instead of my own language (because I thought it would be easier with the tutorials being in English and all). But even though I selected English, strangely enough Audacity wasn't installed in my own language instead of English .

I've also trawled through loads of youtube videos about using Audacity (of which there ar trillions...), I can't see the woods through the trees anymore . I don't know what to do and how, please help!! Thank you!

You can't separate voices from a sound shoot. Once you shoot it wrong it's almost impossible to recover into a radio or podcast show, and sometimes you can't even understand the person speaking.

This American Life radio show has very good web postings on how to "make radio."

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/about/make-radio

They even have a section on the tools they used to do it.

http://transom.org/?cat=6

It would seem you could walk up to someone with an iPhone and start recording and you can, but that only works in very, very quiet locations with no other voices.

Hint: Stay away from MP3. MP3 is a delivery or internet format and damages the sound. Audacity doesn't handle MP3 well. Work in high quality WAV until you have the final show and then, only if you need to, convert to lesser quality MP3.

Koz