PoducateMe: Practical Solutions for Podcasting in Education
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Figure 55: Use Mute and
solo buttons to isolate
playback of tracks.
Click the Mute buttons of any track(s) you’d like to silence during playback, and click the
Solo button to play a single track while simultaneously silencing all the others in the
project.
Once you’re satisfied with your edits, you can save the project, keeping pieces of the
waveform on separate tracks, if you’d like. This will save time if you ever need to go back
and perform additional modifications to your recording. If you have only one track in your
project, skip to the next section on Mastering.
After saving your multi-tracked project, you’ll want to save another version of the project
under a different name with all tracks combined into one. This will facilitate clean up and
preparation of the file for posting to the Internet. Again, keep in mind that anything you do
to your audio in Audacity will not affect your original recording—Audacity only uses that
file as a reference for the new file you’re creating with your edits.
To combine all your project tracks into one, select all tracks in the project by clicking on
each track’s Control Box while holding down your keyboard’s Shift key. Each Control Box
clicked will provide visual feedback that it’s been selected by turning a darker shade of
gray. Next, combine all selected tracks by choosing Project > Quick Mix from Audacity’s
menu bar.
Mastering
Now that your audio has been edited and combined into a single track, we can
concentrate on “Mastering” the recording. Basically, this process serves as a kind of
quality control mechanism that will improve the sound of and add a degree of consistency
to your podcast files. The steps we follow here include noise removal, equalization,
compression and normalization.
iZotope’s Ozone Analog Modeling Plug-In ($199.95) is a very popular piece of software
that integrates a slew of pro-quality mastering effects into a single, affordable package.
As you can see in the screen shot below, many plug-ins are designed to appear is if they
are actual hardware components, replete with realistic 3D buttons and LED displays.
A
B
