Gain practice with the free audio editing tool Audacity. Here's the quick preview:

1. Download and install Audacity Portable.
   
2. You may need to to go through a few additional steps to configure Audacity to export MP3s.
   
3. Complete the Audacity 2.1 Tutorial, and export your finished file as "I://bart-edited.wav" (on your I drive, where you will be able to show it to me).
   
4. Following the general instructions on pages 110-120, edit this short audio clip of me reading part of a poem (your task it to remove coughs and false starts, leaving smoother speech), and layer these ambient sounds underneath the recitation.
   
5. Following the same process you carried out for the Audacity 1.2 Tutorial (above), export a file called "ode-edited.wav". It will be a relatively large file, so to make sure it was complete, you should test it out by playing the exported file (clicking on the icon).

More details on this exercise.

1) Install Audacity Portable

You can download a free version ("Audacity Portable") that is designed to live on a thumb drive, SD card, or your networked I drive. Download the installation program, and install it to a regular computer, a portable drive, or your networked space.

2) Enable MP3 Exports

This step is necessary because the MP3 format is copyrighted, and Audacity doesn't have permission to embed code that enables MP3 exports, but this plugin will make your free software legit.

3) Warm-Up Tutorial

Once you have installed Audacity Portable, for a warm-up follow the Audacity 1.2 Tutorial, which introduces you to how to load, edit, and save a short audio file.

Things to watch for during the first tutorial:

• When you download the clip you are going to edit, bart.wav, where are you putting it? Make sure to note where you have placed it, so that you can find it again.
• Zoom in by selecting CTRL-1 or zoom out by selecting CTRL-3. You may have to adjust the zoom in order to see enough detail to complete step 6 (which asks you to remove one word from an actor's line).When you export your file in step 7, put it on your I drive or on a thumb drive, or somewhere else where we will be able to access it on Tuesday.

Audio files can get very large, so your I drive might fill up. If that happens, you can save these files on the C drive of a network computer, but be sure to export the final WAV or MP3 somewhere you can find it again. (If you leave it on the C drive of a lab computer, you'll have to be sitting at the same computer to access it again, and sometimes the C drives are wiped when they get too full.)

4) Intermediate Editing

Now that you are warmed up, I'd like you to download a 45-second segment of me trying to record a poem while I cough, repeat a line because I didn't like the way it sounded, and while my PDA beeps in the middle of the recording. Your task is to look at the instructions on pages 110-120, which cover such things as trimming the silences before and after a recording session, removing coughs and mistakes, etc.

Here is a short audio file that needs some editing.

Here are the words I was trying to read (with several false starts):

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss

(From "Ode on a Grecian Urn")

And here is a clip of some bird noises and ambient music (by Satori), which you can use for the exercise on 117. (To reduce file sizes, I have exported these files as mono, rather than stereo tracks; our goals is to learn the basics of audio editing, not to make studio-quality music, so we'll cut a few corners.)

5) Export Edited File

If you have configured your software to export MP3s properly, you should be able to save a lot of file space by exporting ode-edited.mp3, but I will accept either an mp3 (compressed) or a wav (raw data) file at this stage.

Note on Exercise Evaluation:

I'm not too worried about whether your exported files are perfect, but I am interested in getting you started with this software. If you can produce bart-edited.wav according to the tutorial and ode-edited.wav using the files I've linked to here and following the procedure described in the book, I'll be very happy and we'll be ready to move on to recording.

Since this is new software, I'm aware that some of you may run into trouble.

If you get stuck, please let me know what part of the tutorial isn't clear, so I can try to improve it. Please feel free to come by during my office hour Monday at 1:30. (I'll also be available after class Tuesday.)

In the slot in Turnintin.com, please submit a brief paragraph that describes your experiences with Audacity. There is no need to e-mail or upload your audio files -- I should have time to listen to them in class on Tuesday.