Audacity

[Chuck Engels]

Can't let too much time go by without mentioning my favorite audio recorder, editor, effect tool box

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audacity

There are also Audacity video tutorials available here at muvipix.com

[Wheat King]

There are also Audacity video tutorials available here at muvipix.com

Cool! I musta missed them. I'll check them out tonight! I've just recently started getting into audio and I'm going to teach myself what hard limiting is and normalizing.

[Chuck Engels]

Hi Jamal,

There really isn't a 'hard' limiting actually, limiting is limiting. There is a very nice explanation here
http://www.harmony-central.com/Effects/ ... mpression/
and some info here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limiting

Normalizing audio just means to make all the peaks and valleys level, similar to compression, not letting peaks exceed a certain level. It will raise some audio levels and lower others, it will make the quite spots louder and the loud spots quiet. Normalizing is used to make the audio levels (high, low and in between) consistant throughtout the entire clip or track.

It is well worth the effort to learn about Audio Limiters, gates, compressors, exciters, enhancers as well as reverb. There is a ton to learn, that is why there are professional audio people and professional video people, not many do both, just too much to learn.

[Ken Jarstad]

Normalizing audio just means to make all the peaks and valleys level, similar to compression, not letting peaks exceed a certain level. It will raise some audio levels and lower others, it will make the quite spots louder and the loud spots quiet. Normalizing is used to make the audio levels (high, low and in between) consistant throughtout the entire clip or track.

Beg to differ with you, Chuck. What you describe is compression!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_normalization
http://homerecording.com/normalizing.html

[Chuck Engels]

Very good Ken

But I don't think my explanation was that far off, trying to be as generic as possible and not to technical.

The only part I really got wrong was that the loud parts would not be decreased (as in compression), instead all levels will be brought up to the loudest levels without adding distortion and still leveling out the audio peaks for the entire clip; would that be better?

[Chuck Engels]

If you have Realtek HD audio the Input selection is most likely greyed out in Audacity and you cannot select Stereo Mix to record what you hear through the speakers. My daughter had this problem so I went in search of an answer, here is what I found.

double-click on the little speaker icon near the clock

In the window that appears, click on "Options" -> "Properties"

In "Mixer device" select "Realtek HD Audio Input"

Make sure you have "Stereo Mix" checked, I'm not sure which audio stream you would need to record from, but it is most likely that one.

Hit the OK button in that window. The volume control should now have the title "Recording Control"

Un-mute "Stereo Mix".

You should now be able to record what comes out of the speakers.

Make sure that in the Input Devices you only have Stereo Mix selected and you will be able to control the record volume from Audacity. It can be a little tricky but it does work