Thanks to Curtis Delzer on the Audacity4blind email list for bringing this to our attention.
Over recent weeks we have seen many people asking if Audacity can be used to assemble group music recordings. As this video demonstrates so well, yes it can.
A little background information from the “top comments” (emphasis mine):
Musicians of the NY Philharmonic
2 weeks ago (edited)
Thank you everyone for your kind words and comments!
We saw a lot of people asking how this was made so here is a quick walk-through:Everyone recorded themselves while listening to a metronome in headphones. The two of us musicians that put this together had no video making experience, just a lot of determination! All the software we used is available for free. We used VLC player to extract all the audio from the video and Handbrake to convert and compress the videos if they were too large or in a strange format. > We used Audacity to remove background noise, align and balance all the audio, and mix it all down into one track. > Finally, we used HitFilm Express (‘Express’ is the free version of HitFilm and similar to iMovie) to align all the video clips and chop them up into different groupings. You could use any video program though and there was nothing about HitFilm that made any of the group shots easier. Using a newish laptop it took 6 hours just to render the video of the 20 second group shot at the end but it can be done without super-fancy equipment.
That and many “how do I…” google searches got us across the finish line!
Best wishes from the NY Philharmonic musicians to you all and stay well!
Thanks to the New York Philharmonic musicians for producing and sharing this work, and of course to the healthcare workers around the world for their tremendous work in helping those in need.
Video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/D3UW218_zPo
