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Hello my name is Darrell Hyatt I’d like to welcome you to the computers with these podcast. I often get asked what software do I use when editing my audio files for my podcasts, as well as what do I do to the audio files them self to make them sound better.
For my podcast I use a free program called audacity to edit my audio files. The program is available for both Windows and Macintosh, and the program works very well in either platform. In terms of what do I do to edit and clean up the audio files themselves.
The first thing that I do once I load the file into audacity is to do a noise reduction which is listed under effects in audacity. One of the things I would recommend when doing audio editing is not to be editing the original audio file, just in case you have to go back to the original for some reason.
You don’t like the edited format you have the option of going back to the original, when using audacity there is a setting that will tell audacity to load a copy of the file rather than the original and this is definitely something that I use. Once you set it you don’t have to worry about it again and will be editing a copy of your file.
As I said earlier I generally do a noise reduction first just to get rid of any background noise that’s in the audio file before I start the actual manipulation of the file one of the first things I look for is any unusual noises that are in the file such as clicks that you may get when you first start recording anything like that that is in there I go ahead and remove.
I also look for breath sounds where I’ve taken a breath as well as any of my uhm’s or oh’s as I’ve been speaking. I also look for lengthy pauses anything obvious like that that I may want to remove, so I will go through the entire file and just delete out any of those obvious things first and you can do this by selecting the area that you want to remove with your mouse, it will be highlighted in audacity and then you can simply press the delete key it will bring up a confirmation and then you can press enter to say yes and each of those will be removed for you.
Then I go ahead and do a more in-depth listen to the audio file and cleanup anything that’s left if I have said the same word twice one after the other all go in and remove the extra word that I don’t want. Then I’ll go ahead and look through it, listen to it and make any other changes that I want to allow myself the cleanest best sounding audio that I can get.
This does take practice and it does take some time to get used to doing it but the more you do the better you will get.
I hope these tips have been helpful, if you have any questions or comments please feel free to email me at darrell@computerswithease.com Thank you very much.