Audacity is a free program available for Mac, Windows and Linux, so most people should be able to download this and use it to clean up their recordings. Today we’ll take you through a few simple steps you can use on all recordings to remove background noise from audio.

Install Audacity

When you’ve downloaded Audacity, you’ll notice that it’s able to be used to import or record music and vocal tracks and can be used to mix tracks together for other purposes. This makes it very useful to musicians and podcasters alike, whether you are an amateur or a professional. It’s very easy to isolate sections of each individual track and use the editing features to remove the ambient noise in the background.

Import Or Record Audio

Either import the audio file you wish to clean up, or use Audacity as the recording tool. In Mac you need to go to Project > Import Audio, whereas in Windows you’d use File > Import > Audio.

Isolate A Quiet Moment

After importing, you’ll see the tracks of the audio file as separate lines in Audacity. This shows the waveform of the track. Flat sections are quiet while big vertical lines indicate the noisy sections.

Zoom in until you can find a moment where there was no deliberate sound in the track (the flattest bit you can find), such as when you paused for a moment. Go to View > Zoom In. Then highlight the flat section by clicking and dragging with your mouse across that part of the track. Audacity suggests this selection shouldn’t be longer than a half a second.

This will isolate a moment where all you recorded was the ambient background noise. By letting Audacity know precisely how much background noise there was, it can calculate how to remove it from the rest of the track.

Step 1 – Get Noise Profile

Once you’ve selected the quiet part of the track, go to select Effect > Noise Removal.

This opens up a dialogue to remove the noise. You’re performing Step 1 here, so click on “Get Noise Profile” and the dialogue will disappear. You can do this again at any time and it will overwrite the previous selection. What happens next is a little confusing, as it has already acknowledged your quiet section of your audio track and simply shut the window on you.

Step 2 – Apply Noise Reduction

Now Audacity needs to know which parts of the audio track you want to apply the noise reduction to. Most likely, you’ll want to apply the reduction to the whole project, so click CTRL-A or CMD-A to select all. If you want to select just a portion of the track or just one track, place your cursor at the start of your desired selection and go to Edit > Select > Cursor to End. Then, to remove ambient noise from the selection, go to Effect > Noise Removal again.

We’ve done step 1, so skip to step 2 now. Move the slider to indicate how aggressively you want Audacity to strip the background noise from your track. Many people tend towards the lower end, since stripping out too much sound can make voices sound quite tinny and weird. You can preview the sound or go straight to “Remove Noise“. If you don’t like it later, you can undo it. Make sure you listen to it before you go on to make more changes.

When you view your tracks, you should be able to see that the peaks are not quite as high, and the flat sections are far flatter now.

If you’re dealing with a special case, such as removing noise from cassette audio, take a look at the full Audacity wiki page on noise removal. There’s some great tips.

See also these great articles on Audacity:

• How to record audio with Audacity.
• How to enhance your recorded audio with Audacity.
• How to Convert LPs into MP3s in Three Easy Steps.

Image Credit: ShutterStock

There are many examples of such cases in the technology world. Let’s take MP3 for example. This digital audio compression format is already adopted by everybody that it’s difficult for other formats to replace it. One of these rather unfortunate formats is FLAC.

Why (Not) FLAC?

FLAC is the format that offers a nice compromise between the “large size but excellent quality” of uncompressed music files and “small but less than excellent” compressed MP3 or AAC files.

Some audiophiles claim that FLAC will give you the near audio CD sound quality while compressing the file size to more than 50%, making it the “almost perfect” sound compression algorithm available today. If you hang around people with golden ears, you will likely stumble into FLAC a lot.

Here’s the explanation of FLAC, quoted from Wikipedia:

Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) is an audio compression codec primarily authored by Josh Coalson and Ed Whitney. FLAC employs a lossless data compression algorithm; a digital audio recording compressed by FLAC can be decompressed into an identical copy of the original audio data. Audio sources encoded to FLAC are typically reduced to 50″“60% of their original size.

FLAC is an open and royalty-free format with a free software implementation made available. FLAC has support for tagging, cover art, and fast seeking.

But as flawless as it might be, FLAC playback support in portable audio devices and dedicated audio systems is limited compared to MP3. All the portable multimedia players that I know support MP3, but I have personally never encountered one that supports FLAC.

To make your digital music portable, you definitely should convert your FLAC files to MP3s. Here are two tools that can help you with that.

Windows: FLAC To MP3

If you are using Windows, you can use a free application called FLAC To MP3. Despite the name, this app is an all round audio converter which can convert many audio formats into MP3 and other kinds of common audio format. The app interface is pretty straightforward. There’s the large “Drag & Drop” area in the middle, the settings on the right, and the basic tools on the toolbar above.

To start, drag and drop FLAC files – or any other audio formats – into the drop zone. You can also use the “+” button on the toolbar above to add files. The app is also able to extract audio out from some video files.

Then choose the output format,

Do some other customization, choose where to save the results, and click the “Start Converting Now” button.

The conversion process is displayed in the progress bar. The process could take a while depending on the number of files that you are converting and the power of your system.

Mac: All2MP3

A similar tool is also available for the Mac. It’s called All2MP3, and as the name suggests, this app will help you convert everything – FLAC, other audio formats, and video – to MP3.  Similar to FLAC To MP3, you can drag and drop the files to the drop zone and they will be automatically converted.

You can adjust the quality of the results by sliding the pointer to the desired position; from Less, to Middle, Good, and finally Super. You can’t choose where to save the files. By default, the converted files will be saved in the location of the original files. Click the “Convert” button to start.

Then all that’s left for you to do is wait. The conversion progress is shown on the progress bars.

After you’ve got the newly-made MP3s, you can then put them into any kind of portable media player and take them along with you.

The two applications discussed above are surely not the only options for FLAC to MP3 conversion. If you use or know of others, please share the links using the comments below.

If you own an iPhone and you want to use your favorite songs to personalize it, but you don’t want to pay another buck for each song that you already own to have those songs converted into iPhone ringtones; here’s a fun and free way to do it.

The Preparation

For those who love Garageband, you can use that amazing music maker to create ringtones. But for today’s discussion, we’ll use a small free program called MakeiPhoneRingtone.

This program can quickly turn your favorite songs into iPhone-compatible ringtones. However, there are limitations to this feature: you can only use AAC files, and the ringtone duration is limited to 40 seconds. A set of preparation steps is needed prior to the conversion process. But don’t be afraid as we can do everything using iTunes.

• The first step is to convert the songs from MP3 into AAC. Open “iTunes – Preferences” menu or use “Command + Comma“.

• Open the “General” tab and click the “Import Settings” button.

• Choose “AAC Encoder” from the “Import Using” field, and choose “iTunes Plus” quality from “Setting” for the best quality.

• Find the song(s) that you want to use as an iPhone ringtone, right click and choose “Create AAC” version from the pop up menu.

• You can also access this option from “Advanced – Create AAC Version” menu.

• The song(s) will be converted by iTunes into AAC, and the process will take about several seconds for every song. After that, right click on the converted song and choose “Get Info” from the pop up menu.

• Choose “Options” tab and set the Start and Stop Time to fit the 40 seconds duration. If you want to go the easy way, just choose 0:00 for the start time and 0:39 for the stop time.

But why go the easy way when you can go the fun way? You can set the start and stop time in the part of the song that you like the most. Play the song and notice the time of the beginning and end of your favorite part.

Even though you can adjust the precision to one-thousandth of a second to get the perfect timing if you want to, my experience has told me that one-tenth precision is enough. For example, you can set the time to 1:12.5 (one minute twelve point five seconds) or maybe 3:42.73 (three minutes forty-two point seventy-three seconds).

This might look tedious, but I personally find the process of determining the perfect beginning and ending of the ringtone fun and addictive. The 40 seconds limit just make the “estimating game” more challenging.

Then repeat the “Create AAC Version” process to the adjusted song, to get the less-than-40-second fragment.

The Making Of The Ringtones

• After getting the perfect slice of the song, right click on the item and choose “Show in Finder“.

• Open MakeiPhoneRingtone and drag that short AAC Version (with the “.m4a” extension) to the app.

• If the edited song is more than 40 seconds, you’ll get a warning (and an offer to try a paid audio editor by the same developer).

• If you do everything correctly, you’ll get your ringtone in iTunes’ “Ringtones” folder in just a blink of an eye.

• Repeat the process for other songs.

Syncing & Using Ringtones

• To make sure that your newly created iPhone ringtones find their way to your iPhone, go to the “Ringtones” tab and check the “Sync Ringtones” box before you synchronize your phone.

• Then click the Sync button.

• In iPhone, you can use different tones for different person. You can also use customized ringtones for your Alarm.

• To assign a ringtone to a contact, select a person and tap on the ringtone option. Choose one of the “Custom” tones and tap “Save“.

• The same thing goes for assigning custom ringtones to your alarms. Open one, tap “Edit” and slide right. Tap “Sound” and choose your preferred sound.

After using the method several times, I began to look at (or listen to?) my song collection differently. Now I always try to find parts of the songs that would make cool ringtones.

What about you? Do you personalize your contacts with different tones? Do you know other free methods to convert your favorite songs into ringtones?  If so, please share using the comments section below.

This week we will be looking at MP3 & audio software. These are the apps that we use to convert, organize or listen to our digital audio files as well as rip physical music to a digital format. There are some awesome applications on this list.

1. JetAudio Basic
	With almost 16 million downloads of all time this application gives you a lot of options. You can rip a CD directly to your file format of choice as well as play around with its cross fader, reverb and MP3 tags. It has a built in alarm clock and a tool to seek out lyrics from your favorite tracks.
2. FreeRip MP3
	This application does a very good job at ripping CD’s. You can rip to almost any format including Vorbis, FLAC, and WMA. It comes with a built in multitrack ripping option and a feature rich audio converter. So not only can you rip your tracks but you can convert them as well.
3. Apple iTunes
	Ah who doesn’t know what iTunes is? iTunes is Apple’s flagship audio product. It links up your iPod’s or your iPhone’s with your music. Even my mother has used iTunes before. And seeing that most people download this from Apple, 6 million downloads in the last year is very impressive.
4. Free MP3 WMA Converter
	Can you guess what this application does from its name alone? You sure can! You can convert audio files to your hearts content . The name suggests it only works on MP3′s and WMA’s but it does do WAV and OGG as well. Converting is a easy task. All you need to do is drag and drop the files to the applications window.
5. Windows Media Player
	The Windows version of iTunes. I happen to use Windows Media Player a lot and it is the heart of the Windows Media Center. You can use it to play, burn and rip your music. You can also rate your tracks and so much more. I said before everyone has used iTunes before and the same goes for WMP!

6. Tiny Youtube Converter Have you ever wanted to convert just the audio from a youTube video to MP3? Well now you can easily and for free.
7. Burn4Free CD and DVD With over 7 million downloads this CD burning application does it all but beware of the toolbar it tries to install on installation.
8. Media Player Classic A lightweight audio and video player.
9. BurnAware Free Create and burn audio disks in addition to DVD’s and being able to burn disk images.
10. Apple QuickTime Quicktime plays MPEG4 videos with AAC sound as well as audio files. It is Apple’s video player of choice and it does what it does well.

If you have other personal favorites let us know in the comments. We want to hear about everything from music players, to rippers and back to applications that help you manage your audio collection. Put us on below.

Regardless what you intend to do with the interview, one thing that’s for certain is that you want to develop a reputation as a professional interviewer that produces high-quality, interesting conversations with fascinating people.

Only part of the recipe for this is developing interesting and thoughtful questions for your interviewee to answer, but the other significant part of the equation is how well you’ve edited the audio interview into a high-quality, professional show. Many avid audio enthusiasts may find some of the edits below somewhat simple, but for the blogger or podcaster with little audio editing experience, these tips are critical to know.

3 Tips To Enhance Your Interview Audio With Audacity

I use the Audacity audio recording software to record and edit all of my interviews. My recording setup is about as simple as it gets – an Olympic earpiece that doubles as both a microphone and an earphone, so that I can hear the person on the phone while the microphone feeds the conversation into the laptop and Audacity. This works well, and produces high quality conversations, but like anything, there are flaws in the setup that produce less than optimum conditions.

The beauty of Audacity is that you have the capability to “fix” those flaws. The three most common problems that I’m going to touch on in this post are removing background noise, amplifying voices, and integrating quality introduction with music.

Before we start doctoring the audio file with the Audacity audio recording software, let me first introduce the patient. Above is a snippet of an hour-long audio interview that I conducted last month. The two most common flaws are background noise, shown in the center of this clip, and low voice volume (my voice) as shown on the right. You can see that the amplitude when I was talking is about half of that of the voice on the phone – which is to be expected when recording with such an earpiece.

How To Fix Quiet Voices

The first tweak for the common interview issue of quiet voices is also the easiest. The volume of the voice is equivalent to “amplitude,” so all you have to do is use Audacity’s Amplify tool to increase the quiet voice just a little bit.

To perform this task, just highlight the section of audio track with the quiet voice, and then select “Amplify” from the Effect menu option.

In the amplify tool, you’ll need to select an amplification that is just enough to increase the voice volume to a level that’s equivalent to the other person speaking. It may take some trial and error the first time, so just undo the change and try a new value until you get it right.

In my case, I found that an increase of 5 dB did the trick. Once you know the right value, the only tedious part of this fix is that you’ll need to find every place in the track where the quiet voice shows up, and do the highlight/amplify routine to fix it.

How To Remove Background Noise With Audacity

The second most common flaw in an interview audio file is background noise. Maybe you left a fan on in the other room, or there are cars going by just outside the open window, and you realize once you listen to the audio that the sound is terribly annoying and distracting.

The first step in this technique is to identify an area in your file that features nothing but the background noise alone. When you find such an area, highlight that section of the audio track, and then go into the “Noise Removal” tool in the Effects menu option.

Once you’re there, click on “Get Noise Profile“. Doing this captures a snapshot of the background noise itself. The software uses this to “erase” that sound profile from a section (or all) of the audio file. The next step is just to highlight the area where you want to remove the noise (most of the time you’ll just select the entire track), and then go back into this window and select “Remove Noise“.

As you can see, Audacity does an amazing job at cleaning up the noise. There is one caveat, and it is this – carefully gauge the amount of noise that you want to remove. Removing too little won’t do much good, and removing too much will make the audio sound over-digitized or artificially quiet. One thing I noticed is that the middle to lower middle setting is usually ideal.

Integrating A Musical Or Voice Introduction

Have you ever heard those cool podcasts with a great musical introduction? Well, believe it or not, you can do the same exact thing in Audacity in just a few simple steps. The first step, obviously, is importing the music file that you would like to use (make sure you don’t infringe on any licensing issues).

The next step is just highlight the block of music you’d like to use as your introduction (select the correct number of seconds) and then do a simple Copy. Then place the cursor at the start of your audio file, and select Paste. The copied music clip will get inserted into your track, pushing the entire interview to the right.

While this is cool, it’ll sound weird because at the end of the clip, your music will just end abruptly. Instead, you want to taper off the music as you enter into the interview itself. You can do this by highlighting the very last part of your music clip and selecting Effect -> Fade Out from the Menu.

You’ll see the amplitude of the music clip taper off as it approaches the end of the clip, and in effect producing a very nice fade into the interview itself.

By using these three simple tips, you’ve just equalized voice volume, removed background noise, and embedded a professional music introduction into your audio interview. With just these few simple changes, you’ll transform amateur sounding interviews into well produced, professional sounding conversations.

Do you perform audio interviews? Do you have any editing tips or tricks of your own? Share your own insights in the comments section below.

After downloading and using MergeMP3 I got a call that they also wanted to split several music tracks into smaller pieces. I found several tools that do these jobs. I figured that I would share my research with you guys.

Let’s take a look at the applications that I found.

We will start off with an application called Slice. The whole download was only 233KB and when I started to install it, I saw that it also had other utilities you can install including a CD ripper, CD burner and others. But for now let’s take a look at Slice.

The application is very straightforward. You click on the add files button to add files. This is how you choose the audio files that you would like to split. Then on the right hand side of the interface you will see options to split the file into x equal parts or to split the audio file after a specified duration.

You choose your sliced folder at the bottom of the window and then click slice. The application will do all the heavy lifting for you and you can add multiple files at a time to do large batches.

Next up we have an application that can split audio & video files. This application is called Media Convert and it is online. You can use this in a pinch if your initial files are not huge or you have a fast Internet connection.

There are a few really good features that I saw in Media Convert. Besides being able to handle ALL audio and video formats it also handles ALL ringtone formats. You can convert your files to something else but you can also convert it to the same format using the split feature.

Simply visit their website, upload your file at the top of the page and select your setting towards the bottom. You can select the input and output format to be the same. In the above screenshot it is set to MP3. Then at the bottom of the screen you can check the check box to split the file into xKB chunks.

Then simply click the I accept the terms button and you will be able to download your converted file. I have also found that this application can split ZIP or RAR files as well.

Our third free program to edit music is called Media MP3 Joiner 1.2. The download was 1.5 MB and installed very quickly. When the application opened it was pretty easy to figure out and use.

I clicked on the plus button to add my tracks. Then you can click the up and down arrows to move around the order of your tracks. Then simply hit the play button to start your merge. It will prompt you to create a filename for the new merged track. It will then merge them. You can then open the merged track and listen to it.

And last but not least we have MergeMP3 which we covered here previously. You can download the application from the authors homepage. The application was a tiny 719KB file. Just like the other applications we need to add our tracks to the program. You can drag and drop or use the File ““> Open feature to get your songs in there. Then you can move the tracks up or down in the order that they will be played with the up and down arrows. Click on the music notes button selected in the shot below to merge your songs into one file.

You will be prompted for the new file name and then the program will assemble your newly merged file.

Do you have a favorite application that allows you to split or merge music tracks? If so we would love to hear about it in the comments!