Audacity: And now we’re back…

Apologies, again, for the technical difficulties. I raced home and installed version 1.2.6 on my husband’s computer and edited Adham Najdi’s interview down to about 1:44 and saved it at three different bit speeds so that we can evaluate the trade-off between quality and download speed. Now I am ready to reintroduce you to the wonderful world of audio. Here are the steps I took to edit this piece. The photo is of Adham and was taken by Gabriela Bulisova.

1. Project–>Import Audio, located the Adham_Najdi_dup.wav file
2. File–> Save Project As…
3. Click next to track beginning to enlarge waveform.
4. Duplicate track in case anything goes wrong. Mute original track. Adjust gain to +15dB.
5. Insert cursor at about 2:51, “What were you studying in school?” Edit–>Select…”start to cursor.” When the selection is highlighted, Ctrl+X.
6. Save
7. Edit–>Move cursor to track start.
8. Tap the space bar to play and pause and play again.
9. Where you hear an “uhhhhhhhh,” select that area and zoom in. (Use edit–>Select…move cursor to end of selection to try something new.)
10. Play again, noting precise times and where to cut.
11. Use hand selector tool to refine your selection.
12. Cut the section between about 8 seconds and 22 seconds.
13. Start again around, “Why were you studying that?”
14. Cut from about 11.8 to 15.6.
15. Split 45.837 to 51.46.
16. Solo original to hear the cut that we’ll have to deal with later when we refine transitions.
17. Select Tariq’s “umm” response with shift+arrow key. Cut.
18. Zoom all the way into 1:53:827 “ghalaT” to get the last bit of the T.
19. Edit–>Move cursor to selection start.
20. Edit–>Select to end. And cut.
21. Now it’s time to go back and deal with the transition. Edit–>Select cursor to end and split.
22. Delete unnecessary tracks.
23. Select a bit of the end of the first track. Go to the Effects menu and choose Fade Out.
24. Fit in window to get a sense of where we are.
25. Zoom in again.
26. Select timeshift tool. <–>
27. Move second half of track to where the first half will overlap it a bit. Select a bit of the initial audio. Go to the effects menu and choose Fade In.
28. Go to the Effects menu and select Fade In. Repeat if it’s not sounding quite right.
29. We need to even the volume out a bit. But first let’s condense the two tracks into one. Select them both by shift+click. Then go to Project–>Quick Mix.
30. Select the volume envelope tool. Create and drag points to adjust the volume where necessary.
31. Listen to the whole track and make sure you like it.
32. Save. Set your streaming speed in the Preferences menu. Go to File–>Export to MP3. That’s it!