In order to better record and edit audio within Audacity, it’s important that we understand what we’re looking at.

Fortunately, Audacity gives us a lot of information just in the waveforms alone. We can use this information to create better quality recordings, reduce editing time, and gain a full picture of our recording at a glance.

Let look at each piece of information now!

In a previous lesson, we looked at all of the various toolbars that Audacity has to offer.

Now, let’s go down and look at the tracks themselves – including all of the various settings, buttons, and sliders. By having an understanding on each one of these things does, it will make it easier to work with tracks in Audacity.

This article is particularly important if you plan on working with multiple tracks at once, such as when recording two-person podcast interviews, or multiple musical instruments.

Once you’ve got Audacity up and running – you’ve either imported audio or successfully recorded some, you may find yourself asking – what now?

Audacity can appear a bit confusing, with a large number of different buttons, menu and icons that don’t have obvious uses. Fortunately, they are all pretty easy to pick up with practice.

In this article, I aim to break down and explain all of these, so you can get a better idea on how to navigate Audacity and explore all of the tools available to you.

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.