LAB FIVE AUDACITY IN DEPTH

MORE AUDACITY REFERENCE

Here are some more useful features in Audacity. Use this section (and
sections like it) as references for further rumination. Dont feel that
you need to understand these concepts completely and use them.

ACCEPTING AUDACITYS LIMITS

One has to remember that Audacity is an open source program,
which means that many authors have contributed to its creation,
usually in their spare time. The program is freeware; you can use it
freely, without feeling that you are using a bootleg version. Its
latest version (1.3) is useable, and many of the most important (and
basic) features of commercial programs like ProTools and Audition
are contained within it. Furthermore, it is available for both Mac
and PC, which is certainly convenient.
While such a concept is laudable, realistically, it has little
chance of completing against a product that is intended to be used
in professional recording studios worldwide. ProTools is meant to
make money for its owners; in order to do so, it has to not only be
utterly reliable, but it needs to continually have new features
appear in successive upgrades to make owners of the program
want to pay more money to buy the latest version. The coders
contributing to Audacity, meanwhile, are struggling to simply not
make it crash with the latest operating system upgrade.

AUDACITY AS AUDIO EDITOR, WITH MULTI-TRACK CAPABILITIES

One way to think of Audacity is not as a full-blown multi-track
program, like ProTools or Audition, but instead as an audio editor
that can play back multiple files. It may not be able to complete
with ProTools, but it can do things no audio editor can do!

AUDACITYS BIGGEST DRAWBACKS

When you first use Audacity, it will seem quite useable, and its
small number of options can be quickly learned, allowing you to
get down to business quickly. But once you start to use it for an
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extended period of time, or, perhaps more importantly, start to use

it for something other than editing and simple mixing, one starts to
wish for a few things.
The top of my own wish list is the equivalent of the ProTools
Audio Region List -some way to handle multiple files without
having to create new tracks every time you import a new file. For
the final two creative projects in this course, you might be dealing
with more than fifty files, if not closer to one hundred. Each time
you import a file, a new track is created, which you have to delete
once you move the file into an existing track.
The other major drawback is Audacitys lack of dynamic
panning. This is not a problem for the first creative assignment;
however, the second creative assignment requires stereo
processing. While there are strategies around this limitation (for
example, create a different tracks that are in different locations in
the stereo field, and place the soundfile/regions into those tracks),
it is limitation nevertheless.

HOW AUDACITY TREATS IMPORTED SOUNDFILES

Audacity operates differently than an audio editor. As mentioned in
Lab Two, Audacity is more like a page layout program than a word
processor. Like a word processor, an audio editor edits a single
document at a time; a multitrack audio mixer, like a page layout
program, assembles several documents into a collection. In the case of
Audacity, this collection is called a project.
It is important to know that the audio data (the thousands of
samples) are not contained within Audacity. This information remains
in the separate and freestanding audio files. Therefore, when you
cut, copy, and paste portions of an imported audio file (as you did
in Assignment One), you are not actually editing the original file,
but merely references to a separate file.
Somewhere within Audacity is a list of all imported audiofiles,
and locations on the hard drive where they can be located. When
you edit a displayed file in Audacity, the program will look at this
list, find where to read the data, then play the data. If you have cut
portions of the file up (as you did in Assignment One), Audacity
will only read those portions of the stored data.
As mentioned above, what Audacity lacks is user access to this
list. In ProTools, this is the Audio Region List. In ProTools, once a
file has been imported, it is displayed within this Audio Region
List; like Audacity, ProTools doesnt operate on the files, but the
references to files. These references are called regions.
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Audacity doesnt have a specific name for these imported files;

however, they function like regions in ProTools, and thus will be
referred to here as regions as well.

Two regions in Audacity. The first region was imported into

the project; the second was copied and pasted from this first
region. Both are independent entities that can be moved,
edited, and processed separately.

TOOLS
Audacity offers several methods of operating, often called Tools in
other programs. The most useful to us are the following three:

SelectionThis tool is probably familiar to you already. It

allows the user to click and drag over a portion of a track to select
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it. Once selected, the region can be moved (using the Move tool), or
processed, or simply played.
MoveThis tool allows you to move selections. If only a
portion of a region is selected, the entire region will be moved. If
nothing is selected, the entire region will be moved.
If more than one region is selected, both complete regions will
be moved if you click on the region that is completely selected.

The Move Tool in action

Volume EnvelopeThis tool will be discussed in Lab Seven.

MOVING REGIONS TO A SPECIFIC LOCATION

THE SELECTION DISPLAY
When moving a region using the Move tool, Audacity displays the
exact point in time for the beginning and end points of the region.

The Edit windows Location display

The selection display is located below the tracks area. Use it to
place a region at an exact point in time.

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INDIVIDUAL TRACK CONTROLS

Each audio track has certain controls available that determine
whether the track will play or not, and what is displayed in the
tracks portion of the window.

1. Mute buttonIf this button is selected, the track is muted and

will not be heard.
2. Solo buttonIf it is selected, the track is sent directly to the
output.
Any non-soloed tracks are not heard.

Several tracks can be combined through individual solo

button selections. If both the solo and mute buttons are
depressed, the solo button will override the mute button.
3. Gain Adjust the overall amplitude of the track, independent of
the volume controls for regions. Normally, it should be left at
0 dB (in the middle).
4. Pan Adjust the stereo position of the entire track. This will be
discussed more fully in later labs
5. Collapse Track WaveformThis button will collapse the track.
This allows more tracks to be displayed on screen at once.

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Four tracks, two of which are collapsed

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