Audacity: Preping project, creating tracks, and recording efficiently.

Introduction

Greetings, my name is Chan Pei Keong, you can call me Nicholas. I live in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and I am currently majoring in Software Engineering and I aspire to become a game developer in the future.

As part of the assignment for Week 2 in Introduction to Music Production at Coursera.org, I will be showing you step-by-step process to an efficient Audacity recording session.

Recording in Audacity

Step 1: Check your settings

1) Check buffer size.

In Audacity's menu bar, go to Edit > Preferences... > Recording. In the "Latency" section, you can see the "Audio to buffer" set at 100 milliseconds. This is the buffer size by default, and it is the recommended setting by Audacity Team. You can set it to 128 milliseconds buffer size.

Lower latency means that the recording will be recorded into the disk much faster and more responsive playback. However, if the setting is too low, it will cause the computer unable to catch up, thus the recording or playback wouldn't work.

2) Set sample rate and bit depth.

In the very same Preferences window, go to the Quality section. Here, in the "Sampling" section, you can see the setting for both the "Default Sample Rate", which is the setting for sample rate, and the "Default Sample Format", which is the setting for bit depth.

For studio recording, it is recommended to set it to 48,000 kHz for sample rate and 24-bit for the bit depth.

3) Select correct input device

In the "Device" section of the Preferences window, you can change your input device and channels at the "Recording" section. Select your correct input device and set your channels to 1 (Mono).

Step 2: Checking instrument

1) Turn down

Turn down the preamp gain in the interface and make sure that the speakers are turned down as well. This is to prevent feedback when turning the instrument on.

2) Instrument to speaker

When plugging in the instrument, make sure that the instrument is directly connected to the monitor as well during the recording as the DAW will have delays and latency when playing back the audio. Turn on the phantom power if your instrument requires it.

3) Slowly turn up and test

Now slowly bring up the level on the preamp gain and the speaker. As you do so, test whether the sound level is at the optimal level. Remember to trust your ears instead of the meters as the meters can be a little bit off. Also, trust the meter outside of the DAW to set the appropriate level.

Step 3: Record

1) Start recording

With all the steps done, you can now start recording. Every time you hit the record button, a new track will be created, so you don't have to worry about creating them yourself. If you don't like your performance, you can always re-record again as it will automatically create a new track every single time.

2) Rename your track

After recording, you should immediately rename your track. At the Track Drop-Down Menu (shown in the picture above), after clicking on it, it will reveal a drop-down menu. Select "Name..." and you can now rename the track. The reason behind renaming tracks is so that it will not clutter up the project folder and made it easier to organize the files and to find it when needed.

Reflection:

While Audacity is a pretty decent free and open source software and provides few shortcuts in functionality (such as automatically creating new track for every single records), it lacked critical functions such as the countoff before recording. Nonetheless, it is still a good software for quick and dirty recording and editing for both amateurs and professionals.

Source:

1) Coursera.org (Introduction to Music Production):
- Week 2 Video Lecture - Recording Audio

2) Audacity Manual (AudacityTeam.org):
- Recording Preferences, http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/recording_preferences.html
- Quality Preferences, http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/quality_preferences.html
- Devices Preferences, http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/devices_preferences.html
- Audio Tracks, http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/audio_tracks.html