Audacity help

Will Houston · From: Tempe, Az

I finally downloaded it. I knew I wouldn't know what to do with it when I got it, I was right.
Can I copy a disk right from the computer? and how would I do that. Or can you just do stuff from "line in" like from a tape player.
What I want to do is copy a cd to Audacity and edit it using the tools available. Is this possible?
Thanks for any help, ideas, or suggestions.
Will

Robert Tripp · From: Mesa, Arizona, USA

Hi Will, depending on your sound card, you should be able to select the source in audacity, then play the audio CD as usual from you Computer's CD Drive. While it's playing, you should be able to set the input source in Audacity to something like "What you hear", or the audio source from your sound card, and record it into audacity.

Once you have the recording, you can edit it with the plugins found in audacity.

good luck.
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Mitch Drumm · From: Frostbite Falls, hard by Veronica Lake

Will:

I would break it down into steps.

You should probably start with Audacity version 1.3.8. It is a beta, but it is very stable in my experience and has a lot of improvements that are not in the earlier 1.2.x series. You can use them both on the same PC as long as you only run one of them at a time.

Although you could use Audacity directly on the CD, I would instead copy the CD tracks to my hard drive and then use Audacity on those hard disk copies.

It can be frustrating to learn. There are some good help files at the Audacity web site and an Audacity forum out there too.

Once the files are on your hard drive, you would open each song up in Audacity and then use the Audacity tools on it--cutting off the intro, the tail, fading, using the built in equalizer, noise reduction, various effects, or whatever you need to do.

You have to get to the point where you hear the song over your headphones and see the green meters light up when you poke the green playback button in Audacity.

If you don't hear the song and see the meters, your settings are wrong--maybe in Windows sound control panel or maybe in Audacity itself. The relevant Audacity settings are under the Edit/Preferences menu. Pay attention to the playback and recording device settings.

The general sequence is open the song in Audacity, operate on it as necessary, and then export the edited song back to your hard drive in the format of your choice. You could then burn that edited song back to another CD.

You will see references to "project" in the Audacity menus--I have never seen a need to save anything as a "project" for my purposes. I just import, operate, and export back to the hard drive.

The Audacity tools generally work ONLY on a selected portion of the song and you would typically select that portion with the mouse. You can also choose "select all" from a menu. You are going to have to get accustomed to zooming in and out to look at smaller sections of the song. You can fill your screen with a thousandth of a second of the song if you need to--just zoom way in.

Do all possible editing before conversion to a compressed format such as mp3. If an mp3 is opened in Audacity, it is decoded and is then re-encoded when saved. This reduces fidelity to some degree, although your ear may not be able to detect the degradation.

richard burton · From: Britain

I put some Audacity advice on THIS THREAD which may be of use to you.

Will Houston · From: Tempe, Az

Thanks for the info guys.I guess I'm going to have to just play around with this. I tried some of these things and nothing was working, I came back a few hours later and inported a song from the hard drive and it worked, I tried the same thing with another song and it didn't work, I just got hissing. So I dunno.
Thanks for the help.
Will

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