You should never simply plug in your microphone, and immediately start recording. This is an easy way to end up with a ruined audio file, that only a few seconds of preparation would have prevented.

It’s crucial that we address some things that you should do before you start recording your audio into Audacity. These are very important to do, because there are certain things you want to make sure you get right before you actually sit down to start recording.

They only take a few moments, but they can literally prevent your entire recording from getting ruined. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to spend time recording something, only to realize that something wrong happened and the recording is unsaveable. It happens to beginners all the time and it sure is disheartening.

I’ve even heard stories of podcasts hosts having to throw away entire interviews with important guests due to poor recordings. Scary stuff!

If you’re going to be recording directly into Audacity, you’re going to want to make sure that you’re using some sort of external microphone, rather than the microphone that’s built-in to your laptop. In this article, let’s quickly look over how you can set up your microphone with Audacity, on a Windows operating system.

If you’ve been following along my Audacity series so far, you may think it’s silly to talk about saving and closing projects before we even edit anything. Well, we know that audio editing takes time, and we don’t always want to do it one sitting.

Once you’ve got Audacity downloaded and installed, it’s time to begin working with audio. While you can record audio directly into Audacity quite easily, in this video I’ll be showing you how you can import audio clips yourself.

Now Audacity on its own can already import most common audio formats like .mp3 or .wav. If you installed FFMpeg from the Audacity downloads page, it will also be able to handle other audio formats, such as the formats that are bundled with different video cameras.

Anyway, there are two ways that you can import audio into Audacity, and both of them are quite simple.

Let’s jump straight into how you can install Audacity onto your computer. In this example I’ll be installing it on Windows 10, but the process is very similar if you’re going to also be installing it on Mac or Linux.

To start, you’ll want to visit audacityteam.org, which is the official website for Audacity. There are other places you can download it from, but it’s usually a good habit to download it directly from the company if you can, so you can ensure that isn’t been tampered with, bundled with any other software you potentially might not want, and so on.