The Art of the Audio Essay
PWR 2 Fall Quarter 2007
Jonah G. Willihnganz
Stanford University

Audacity Protocol

Audacity is an open-source freeware program and so it is not quite as stable as professional programs like Pro Tools, Cool Edit or Audition. The program has become much more stable over the last year but a few issues remain. If you follow the recommendations here, though, you should not have major problems. I will explain many of these in class, but you can refer back to them here. Remember that you can consult with your RCC to answer simple questions about file conversion, your computer's settings, etc.

1. Audacity creates "projects" and these consist of two items: (1) an .aup project file and (2) a data folder. You always need both of these to work on and play your project. Always keep them together.

2. Although projects rarely get corrupted, back up frequently. If Audacity ever crashes or loses data you don't want to have to start from scratch. I make a duplicate copy after each substantial work session.

3. When you are working in Audacity close as many other applications as possible. Audacity is processer intensive and works best if it can hog a lot of RAM.

4. Always open Audacity and then open projects and import audio using menu commands. That is, do not double click files to open the program or to bring any audio into the program and do not drag and drop files into the program.

5. Always import audio using the Project menu's "Import Audio" command. Do not cut and paste clips from one project to another—always import the clip and then trim if necessary. Always create new audio tracks that you are recording (e.g., narration) by clicking the record button or by choosing the Project menu's "New Stereo Track" command.

6. Audacity refers back to the audio files you have imported and sometimes cannot play portions of a project if you move or rename your audio source files. Keep all of your source audio for your project (interviews, narration, music, sound effects, etc.) in a single folder and do not move or rename the folder or any of the source files. For this reason, build your project on a single computer.

7. Do not use .mp3 files in your project if you can help it. These are compressed files and when you compress the entire project into an mp3 when you complete it the project may not play properly or the .mp3 sections will sound terrible. Only use uncompressed audio—usually these are .aiff (mac) or .wav (pc) files. If you have to, make sure it is compressed at the sample rate of 44100Hz, otherwise buggy things may occur (especially on PCs).

8. Audacity will not import audio files with the .wma extension. A few of the recorders we use create this type of file so you must always use the Olympus DSS Player (that comes with the recorder kit) to convert them to .wav before they can be used by Audacity.

9. Avoid placing multiple clips in a single track. This can make editing complicated (especially as you try to reposition tracks in relation to one another for proper timing) and it can lead to buggy behavior.

10. If your computer does not have a very fast processer or very much storage memory, before you record your narration track in Audacity change the default recording sample rate (which is quite high and taxes your processer and memory considerably). Go to the Audacity preferences panel, choose the "Quality" tab and change "Default Sample Format" from 32 bit to 16 bit.

11. Be sure you have enough storage memory available to create your project—at least 2GB is recommended. If your computer is almost out of storage memory, then you will experience slow-downs and crashes.

Troubleshooting

1. If you get skipping—that is, if tiny (less than a second) parts of your clips dissapear as you begin building the piece—this is because your computer cannot write the sound to the hard drive fast enough. See these suggestions under "Skips" to solve this problem.

2. If, after importing over 15-20 clips Audacity starts runs slowly, stalls, or starts and stops on its own, try changing If this doesn't solve the issue, try building your project in two or three separate parts, one project for each part around 5-7 minutes, for example. This will keep the clip count in each project low enough to avoid these problems if they occur on your computer. Once you are done with the parts, export each as a .wav or .aiff file and then import those parts into a new project, line them up, and export. It's my understanding that the slowdown or stalls often has to do with how much RAM memory your computer has or the way Audacity is allocating virtual memory on your machine.

3. Mac users: if you get a "scratchy" sound when you are recording your narration directly into Audacity, email me and I will help.

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