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Difficulty: Medium
Expected Duration: Couple of Hours
Description
Putting interesting audio into a video is clearly cool, but how can you avoid the pitfalls and limitations that are so common? The biggest key to doing it right is caring about doing it right, if you know what I mean. Plenty of people can add video, but only some go to the trouble of making it good. The good news is that making audio work right isn't hard, so away we go. Let's do this!
The goal in this section is to grab a workable piece of music, and mix it with your voice to create the audio file you want. Please check out the "Make Exceptional Videos: Doing Cool Things with Audio - Digging Deeper" tutorial.
Basic Steps
Here are the steps for this activity. For more details, check out "Make Exceptional Videos: Doing Cool Things with Audio - Digging Deeper".
- Go to Jamendo.com or PodSafeAudio.com and find a song to download.
- Download the song and rename it so that you have all the citation data you need. Put the song in a folder that you create specifically for your audio editing practice. Save the project.
- Using the song you downloaded earlier. Drag the file into the open Audacity window. Once in, play it to make sure it is what you expected, then mute the track so you can record your voice. Save the project. If this is confusing, please see "Make Exceptional Videos: Doing Cool Things with Audio - Digging Deeper".
- Record your voice and move that part of the new track to the place you want it to go with the song. You'll probably need to raise the gain (the upper of the two horizontal sliders on the track) for your voice, but don't do it so much that what results sounds bad. Save the project.
- Next, use the envelope tool to bring down the volume in the song enough to allow your voice to come through properly. Fade the track out so that it works as if you were going to use it as an opening in a video. Save the project, and then export it as a .wav file.
- Finish by uploading your audio piece to the Activity
- Follow that by commenting on the audio piece of others in the forum, and post a link in your space to the one you listened to and what you had to say about it.
