Recording Sound with Audacity


In this tutorial we shall record a sound track using Audacity. Audacity is free open source software avilable for download from: https://www.audacityteam.org/download/

 

Open Audacity.

Click record and speak some words into the microphone.

When finished speaking the words click stop

If audacity shows the wave-form (shown in blue) for our recording to not venture far from the middle:

it is too quiet.

If it reaches the limit:

 

it is too loud.

We should aim for it looking something like this:

 

 

If we want to start at the beginning of the track when recording again, first close the current track:
 

To get the optimum level for the microphone select Mic in Audacity's drop down control and use it's level slider:
 

 

The time-line above the recorded track is in seconds. Knowing that our movie lasts for 2 seconds we can see if our recorded words are located at the right time. In the following example the words end to late and so a portion of silence is selected (by dragging the mouse):

and cut out.

 

Because FFmpeg will use the sound track to detimine the length of the movie we should aim for the sound track to last a fraction more than the duration of the movie. The example movie lasts 2 seconds.

When we are happy with our sound track export it as a wav file.

 

Save the sound track to the same folder we have all the files for our movie located in with the name simple-realistic-animated-female.wav:


If we use a video editor such as OpenShot it won't matter what file name we use but if we are using only FFmpeg to add the soundtrack we must name it simple-realistic-animated-female.wav because the batch file that was generated by Seamless3d will specify this file name (the same file name used by the smls file).

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