The first in the 'Series' of How-To videos is below: How To: Trim Audio In Audacity.
I must state, though, to start with, that you don't need Audacity to be able to trim audio in this way. As you may know, there are a wide variety of different audio editing programs out there that are available, and, as far as I'm aware, they all work in a similar way when it comes to trimming audio.
Now I've got that off my chest, I can carry on!
Audacity is a free download from audacity.sourceforge.net and is, as I've said before in my look at Audacity and some of its features post and its respective video.
In this post, however, I'm telling you how you can actually dive in and get in with the editing of the audio itself.
First of all, you'll actually need some audio. In this example, I used Ke$ha's Tik Tok as it has a sound effect that I wanted to edit out. One thing I must say is that I advise that you make a copy of the audio before you edit it. If it goes wrong, then you won't have the original.
On with the actual editing now, then. First off, you need to select the audio that you want to delete. A common mistake here is that a user may edit the stuff they want to keep. Don't do this. Instead, as I just said, select what you want to delete. In audacity, this is done by going to the select tool on the top left of the screen (the icon that looks like an 'I'), clicking it, then going down and selecting your audio.
I went and selected everything before the stuff I wanted to keep, first, and then going to 'Edit' and then 'Delete'. However, you can be much quicker by just pressing the delete key on your keyboard. Note: You can neither select audio nor delete it when audio is playing or is part way through. Press the 'Stop' button (the square) and then the 'Go back to the beginning' button, the one that is like '|<<'. So, once you've deleted the parts before what you want to keep, go delete the bits after it. Finally, you'll want to zoom in (hold 'Ctrl' whilst scrolling, or press 'Ctrl' and '+') and delete the bits that you've no doubt missed before and after the audio, just tidying it all up. So, now, you have a nice bit of trimmed audio that you can play to your heart's content. Audacity will, by default, save as an audacity project. You can't play this in any other programs, so you want to go to 'File' -> 'Export' -> 'Export as Wav' or 'Export as MP3'. To do the latter, however, you'll need the 'LAME' extension for Audacity, and I'll be showing you how and where to get that in another video! :P
Hope you enjoy the video!
Latest Tech News: Unless you've been living under a rock on a desolate wasteland of a planet for the last god knows how long, you'll no doubt know that Apple have got one of their amazing keynotes coming up next Wednesday. There are many things that are rumored to be released during the event. However, the widely anticipated Apple tablet is supposed to be one of them, along with iPhone OS 4.0, and some further Mac updates and upgrades. To be honest, if Apple do end up releasing a tablet, I don't know what's going to be happening with it, I don't really get all the fuss around tablets, and I do know that I'm not alone with this. I guess we'll just find out on Wednesday!
In Other News: As I said in my previous post, I've got a ton of new videos coming in total, read that post to find out more!
For now,
Yours,
Ratscallion
