Audacity: Free Audio Editor

HubPages has a fantastic video capsule where you can add all your favorite videos, whether they're from YouTube, Google, Revver or Metacafe. But it does not have an audio capsule. Wouldn't it be marvellous if HubPages adds an audio capsule to its hubs. Most of us would definitely love to add narration or music to spice up our hubs.

We love music, whether it is from a music CD, video or from the Internet. We also like to download music from the Web and rip music from a CD. Besides just listening to the music, very often we want to edit, cut, copy and paste parts of recordings and add effects like echo, amplification and noise reduction. And, if we are into video production, we want to do all these actions as well as record our own audio tracks to enhance our videos. In order to do all these things, we need an audio or sound editing software. And it is a must-have tool in our PC.

A full featured professional audio editor does not come cheap and moreover we really don't need all the fancy features for our audio editing needs. An audio or sound editor with basic editing functions such as cut, copy, paste, delete, insert, silence, and audio effects like amplify, normalize, equaliser, envelope, reverb, echo, reverse, and sample rate conversion would do just fine for most of our needs. And the most important feature should be-- it must be free without any restrictions.

There lots of free resources in the Internet and my favorite audio or sound editing software is a reliable and powerful freeware called Audacity. It is totally free and is available from http://www.download.com. and there are versions for Windows, Mac, and even Linux.

Version 1.2.6 has been downloaded more than 2.7 million times and has an average user rating of 4 stars out of 5. For the more adventurous, there are beta versions for more exciting edits.

The Audacity audio or sound editor can record and play sounds and import and export WAV, AIFF, MP3, and OGG files.

Audacity has all the basic features you'll ever need. They include editing sounds using cut, copy and paste, mix tracks, or apply effects to recordings. It also has a built-in amplitude- envelope editor, a customizable spectrogram mode, and a frequency-analysis window for audio-analysis applications.

Some of the built-in effects include bass boost, wah wah, and noise removal, and the program also supports VST plug-in effects and supports 32-bit floating-point audio.

Audacity is very easy to use with its clean and uncluttered interface. Most of the functions such as effects, edits, and project management can be done through drop-down menus. The performance of most functions is fast even for hugh tasks such as exporting to MP3 or adding complex effects. Though Audacity doesn't offer advanced effects, its usability and reliability make this freeware a great addition to your PC collection of media tools.

One of the most common tasks in audio editing is to select a portion of an audio file that we want for our project. Sometimes, we cut several portions and re-arrange parts of audio files so that they fit neatly into a song or a voice project. Usually we will cut away unwanted sections to get a cleaner sound.

Oftentimes, we trim a song or music to fit into a video or join 2 songs together. So, we edit the audio files to put two sections of the songs in a line or to fade in/out a part smoothly.

Cut

To trim a music is easy. Just select the spot where you want the music to stop, highlight the section you want to delete and hit the Cut button. Or you can do it another way: highlight the portion you want and click Select.

Fade In/Out

To fade in/out a part smoothly is slightly trickier to get a good, clean sound. But with Audacity, this is easy. Just go to the beginning of the song, highlight about a second or two of the track, click Effects and select the Fade in tab from the pull-down menu.  

If you want to fade-in/out a track you can either use the Fade in/out or Cross-fades in/out. The longer the fade the smoother it sounds.