Before Recording: Audacity Set-up

Make sure your microphone and headphones are plugged into the PC. Launch Audacity and check to see that Microphone is selected in the drop-down menu on the tool bar for the recording source.

Now, from the menu bar up top, select File then Audacity Preferences. In the window this brings up, select the Audio I/O tab. Make sure that your sound card is selected for the Playback and the Recording device. Also, under Recording there is the Channels drop-down box, select 1 (Mono).

Now select the Quality tab and select 44,100 Hz for the Default Sample Rate and 16-bit for the Default Sample Format. These quality settings will work fine for recording voice in mp3 format.

Select the File Formats tab. In the drop-down box under Uncompressed Export Format, select WAV (Microsoft 16 bit PCM). Select the Find Library button and browse to the location of the LAME codec (lame_enc.dll) that you extracted and add it. Set the MP3 Bit Rate to 64 in the drop down menu if the audio will only consist of a voice. If music or other audio files will be used along with voice, leave the Bit Rate at 128. Once these settings are set, click OK to exit the Audacity Preferences window.

Recording

First, the microphone needs to be adjusted for your recording session. In Audacity's Meter toolbar select the microphone icon. You should see the audio monitor come up. As you make noise you will see the red bar move up and down. While talking into the microphone, adjust the volume so that the bar travels as far to the right as it can go with out causing the end section to turn red. If this happens your audio will sound distorted, and if set too low, the audio will be quiet. Now you can record.

To begin recording, press the red record button and speak into your microphone. You can pause the recording at any time by pressing the blue pause button; press the pause button again to resume. When you finish recording press the yellow stop button.

To save the file, at the top select File and Save Project As…. When naming the file, it is recommended to name the file with relevance to the contents of the audio file or lecture (i.e. Lec01_abcdefg.aup). The project will be saved as an .aup file. It is important to save the file immediately after you record to ensure that the recording does not get lost and/or if it is edited incorrectly there is still a source file.

After saving the project, the file can be edited. Using the audio control tool bar, (same as above) you can listen to the audio file that was created. By simply highlighting areas in the audio and pressing the delete you can remove audio where there maybe long pauses, coughing, and etc. As shown here the desired area is highlighted and about 1 second of audio is deleted.

Once your audio file is exactly how you like it, you must save it in MP3 format. To do this, select File and then Export As MP3… and save the .mp3 file to your desired directory folder. It is recommended that you name the file the same as the first save; the two files will be different due to their file extensions (.aup and .mp3). The ID3 tag window will appear and this is where the files details are entered.

Suggestions are as follows:

• Title > Lecture Name
• Artist > Your Name
• Album > Class

The other boxes you may leave blank or fill if you like. When you are finished, click OK.

You have successfully made a recording in MP3 format!