Timer Recording in Audacity

One of the great new features of the Audacity 1.3.2 Beta is the Timer Record functionality that they have added. This feature allows you to do a couple of things with a timer. You can either set a recoding to start at a pre-arranged time or you can start a recording and have it run for a set length of time before stopping. In this tutorial, I will detail how to do the latter. This tutorial...

How to Switch from Stereo to Mono in Audacity

I often work with audio that is spoken word rather than music. I always capture this audio in stereo (2 channels) as one channel is often louder than the other. However, I want my finished product to be in mono (1 channel) because the file size is roughly half that of a stereo file and spoken word audio does not benefit aurally from being in stereo. Audacity can easily convert stereo files...

Truncate Silence in Audacity

There are a lot of times when working with audio that you may wish to shorten the final product in a way that does not change how the audio sounds. I often transfer audio from a 90-minute cassette and need to get it to fit on an 80-minute CD. In other cases, I want to make my streaming audio files as small as possible so that they will stream easier over the Internet. Audacity offers a great...

Change Tempo in Audacity

Audacity offers many great tools for editing audio files. We use Audacity, which is a free and open-source tool, over a number of other apps that we paid good money for. One of the major things that we use it for is to convert audio cassettes onto CDs. Unfortunately, a 90-minute tape will not fit on a CD, which can only hold 80 minutes of audio. In order to get our audio to fit, we use tools in...