Digital Audio for Public Historians (4): Editing Your Audio

Today, I am going to work with you on some basic audio editing techniques. As you will remember from class, we could use any number of programs to edit, such as GarageBand or Audacity. Since we all have a free subscription to Adobe Audition, I am going to demonstrate with it.

While the techniques that I am showing you today look different in different programs, all audio editing programs have the functionality that I am demonstrating.

Let's get started.

Importing Your Audio File

In class, I have already walked you through how to make basic recordings. Depending on your recorder, the file you use might be a .wav, an .mp4, or an .m4a file.

Let's work from the premise that you already have an audio file.

The audio file with which we will be working today is a speech that Shirley Chisholm (1924-2005) gave at the University of Missouri, Kansas City on 17 June 1974.

It's an .m4a file, and I have it on my computer's hard drive.

To begin editing it, we need to import this file into our audio editing program. Fortunately for us, this is usually just a drag-and-drop process. Here's how it works.

Volume Control and Fading

Depending on the quality of our recording, we might want to adjust sound levels. Audio editors make this very easy to do.

The two videos below show you how to adjust the amplitude of your sound files as well as do finer grained fading and audio manipluation.

Cutting and Splicing

There are times when we want to cut sections out for our audio and splice them with other sections of audio. Again, this is quite easy to do. The video below shows you how.

Exporting Your Recording

After we have completed the editing process in our sound editing program, we will need to export our edited recording as a .wav, .mp4, or .m4a file. Doing this requires one more step that I explain in this video.

Assignment (Work in groups of 2)

Now that you’ve seen how to do some basic audio editing, it’s time to try it out for yourself.

1. Download the audio clip here.

2. Using Adobe Audition, which you can download from IUWare, access from IU AnyWare, or access on a computer in the library, open the file in Adobe Audition.

3. Cut all but the first 5 minutes of the audio file.

4. Create an audio fade in at the beginning of the file and an audio fade out at the end of the file.

5. Export the file as a .wav file and upload to Canvas.