Have you ever recorded a coaching session, conference call, interview or other phone recording and desperately needed to remove the first minute or two of chatter? How about needing to edit portions of an audio prior to publishing on the Web or adding to your shopping cart as a new product? In times like these, it is important to have a reliable system in place to make things happen fast — like ‘right now’ fast.
Audacity is a free piece of software for audio editing, and very well might just be the system for you. Looking for Setup instructions? We’ve got you covered! Our recent Audacity for Windows 7 Installation Tutorial includes setting up LAME (for MP3 conversion) as well!
For today’s walk-through, we’ll be using Audacity 1.3 Beta (Unicode) for Windows 7 (as run via Parallels on a MacBook Pro).
Step 1: MP3 Download
Before one can edit their AudioAcrobat recording in Audacity, the first step is to make sure that the file resides on the hard drive of the computer on which editing will be performed.
1. Login to your AudioAcrobat account
2. Click Audio (L)
3. Click the Title of the Audio you wish to Download
4. Click Download Audio
Looking for Expanded Steps? Try HERE.
Step 2: Open in Audacity
Now that the file our readers wish to edit is on their computer’s hard drive, they will want to open the file with Audacity. Right-click the file and choose Open With and select Audacity from the list. Don’t see it listed? Open Audacity from the Programs portion of the Start menu on the left side of the task bar. Open the software and click File >> Open, selecting the audio to be edited.
Once the file opens in Audacity, our readers will see something like this:
Step 3: Highlight, Delete + Export
It really is that simple. Click and drag with the mouse cursor or for those keyboard enthusiasts out there use Shift + Left / Right arrow keys to select the area that you wish to edit out.
After highlighting a section of the audio to be previewed/deleted (we chose a small sample at the very beginning of our audio), anyone following along should see something like this:
Press the Space Bar (or the Play button) to preview the section to be removed and either press the Delete key, Ctrl-x or the Cut or Delete commands/buttons within the Edit menu (top of screen) to remove the highlighted area.
When satisfied, select File >> Export to save the newly edited version and head over to AudioAcrobat in an internet browser to begin the upload process.
Here we’ve walked through the process of opening our file and deleting an unwanted portion using Audacity for Windows 7. Did you get stopped somewhere in the process? Make sure you have LAME correctly setup then shampoo, rinse and repeat the steps listed above. Success will be yours!
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Coming up next … a new Audacity (Mac OS X) tutorial!
