Audacity is a digital audio editor and recording software available for pretty much everyone for free. In Audacity, you can load, edit, mix and export audio files also. I chose this lesson because you can make music with this software. I have been doing music stuff since I was about five years old so when I saw that this was an option it caught my eye. In this lesson, I had some familiarly with this lesson because I know how to do most of the stuff that was showed but I use a different software called GarageBand, that’s only for Apple users.
There were a lot of steps to for this lesson about Audacity, but if you never used it those steps will be very useful because one little mistake could mess up the whole project that you are working on. First, I had to download the software to my computer, and also download a mp3 file. Once I did that, I had to put the file into the software and once that happened, Audacity turned it into a waveform because that is what’s commonly used for representing sound. They then had a part where you could you could see what the X and Y Axis of the software. The X-Axis stands for how long the audio file is, and the Y-Axis represents the loudness or volume of the file. The Author of the article then explains how to record on Audacity. This part was the easiest because all you do is press a big red button on the top of the screen. One important step that was stated was that you should do is turn your laptop’s sound output into its input so sounds from all around don’t interfere your recording. The next step was to edit the audio file to get extra unwanted noise and frequencies out of the recording. You do this by dragging the first part of your recording back until sound or your recording starts playing. Finally, we had to export the track but I had to change the file type to mp3 because everything you do in Audacity is saved as their own filetype called .aup.
During this lesson, I didn’t face any problems because again, I work with music stuff all the time. It can get a little confusing on where to find certain things because of everything that the software has to offer that wasn’t mentioned in the lesson also. This whole lesson took about an hour for me to finish. I went back and did some more practice on it and I can say once you start to get the hang of it, things definitely get easier over time.
Overall, I think that Audacity is a great source. It provides a lot of resources and can be used for a lot of different things. Audacity could be used for Digital History because if you have a old recording of something and you can find a way to make it into an audio file that can be used, you can enhance the audio to make it more clear, easier to hear by refining the volume and a bunch more.
