It even provides a way to subtract the noise more or less aggressively, in case you start to hear the filtering encroaching on parts of the signal you want to retain. It works by sampling a bit of the noise, then removing those frequencies throughout the recording.

At mixdown time, don't forget to experiment with the pan control found below the Mute and Solo buttons.Īlthough we are primarily concerned with making digital recordings that tend to be very clean, note that Audacity's noise reduction, also found in the Effect menu, is remarkably good for a project like cleaning up digitized cassette tapes.

To apply an effect, just highlight a track or region, then select the effect you want from the dropdown menu.

Effect/Pitch does a good job at pitch-correction, although some guesswork and using your ears may be involved.

If a track sounds a little weak, either use Effect/Normalize or Effect/Amplify to boost the gain.

The magnifier tool (zoom) is helpful when making fine edits.

You can then highlight or drag one portion of the track for further editing.

To split a track, place the cursor where you want to make the edit, then go to 'Edit/Clip Boundaries/Split' or use the Ctlr+I shortcut.

Assuming all went well, here are some frequently-used actions: From Audacity's Edit/Preferences/Devices menu, configure it to record from Hydrogen as in the screenshot below.īack in the main menu, select 'Track/Add Track', click the record button, and you should see the waveform appear as you play your drum track or other synth. Anyone who has used a tape recorder should feel at home with Audacity once the audio input is configured.īe sure that JACK is running and you have a soft synth like Hydrogen launched prior to opening Audacity. If you mouse over Audacity, the simpler of the two, it says 'record and edit audio files', but this belies the fact that you can add as many tracks as you like. Because this book is about multi-track recording, we will focus on two, Audacity and Ardour, both of which can be found on the main 'Audio Production' menu. A number of recording applications are available for Linux.

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