Recording your Voice Tutorials 2 - Setting the Computer Setting Audacity Wayne B. Dickerson In this tutorial we want to insure that your computer and Audacity will do the best recording job they can do when you record your assignments. Two steps are involved. First, we ll set the computer to record with full volume from a microphone. Second, we ll set Audacity to give the best recording quality in the smallest file size possible. Remember: This tutorial will move along automatically. However, if you want to pause, or go back a slide, or move forward or resume playing, just right click your mouse on the screen for these options. If you want to return to the main menu, just press the Esc key. Let s start with your computer. To get good volume when your record using a Windows computer, it is necessary to set the record volume. To reach the record volume controls, requires a number of steps. We will illustrate these steps then review them at the end. We start with the volume control icon which looks like a little speaker or megaphone. It can be found down in the lower right hand part of your screen, in the tray close to your digital clock. In the tray, you will find an icon that looks like this one. Next, right click on the icon. 1
You will see several selections, one of which is Open Volume Control. Click on Open Volume Control. When you do that, you will see the volume control for PLAYBACK devices; that s the default. To set the volume control for a RECORDING device, click on Options in the upper lefthand corner. This will give you a couple of choices. Select Properties. 2
Now you have the option to click on the radio button for Recording. Of all the options available, select only Microphone; all the others should be unselected. With only Microphone selected, click OK at the bottom of the dialog box. This single volume control pops up. You can now move the sliding bar to the top of the range for full recording volume. If you then click on Options, 3
you will then have the choice to select Advanced Controls. When you do that, an Advanced button shows up at the bottom of the microphone control. By clicking on the Advanced button, you will have a chance to click on Microphone Boost at the bottom of the next window. A check mark next to Microphone Boost, will allow your microphone it produce greater volume. If, after you test your microphone, you decide that you have too much volume in your recording, you can remove the Microphone Boost. But in most cases, you will need the extra boost. Click Close. You should check that your microphone is plugged into the microphone input on your computer. The pinhole jack has a little icon next to it that looks like this. 4
The long series of steps required to reach Microphone Boost is reviewed in this slide. If you start with the Volume Control speaker and then choose Options before Properties, you should be able to reach Microphone Boost without difficulty. Now let s turn to a few easy settings inside of the Audacity program. First, click on the Audacity icon to bring up the Audacity recording program. You are now ready to make a test recording. In Audacity, you need to tell the program that you are going to record with a microphone. Use the pull-down menu to select Microphone. 5
Next set the quality of your recording. You can set the recording quality in the Preferences menu. Go to Edit then to Preferences. Quality is measured in Hertz, or cycles per second. The higher the quality, the larger the file size. A standard telephone can transmit a range of sound pitches between 200 Hz and 3400 Hz. High fidelity starts in the range of 30 Hz to 15,000 Hz. When we make a voice recording, we want a quality that is better than a telephone, but we do not need the quality of high-fidelity music. The default is 11025 Hz, more than three times better than a telephone, but not quite up to high fidelity. That will give us excellent quality for voice recordings. So check to see that the Sample Rate is set to 11025 Hz then click OK. In summary, with the computer properly set, we have just completed the settings in Audacity. We selected the microphone device on the opening page then we set the recording quality by going to the Edit menu and selecting Preferences where we set the Sample Rate to 11025 Hz. The settings on your compute and in Audacity do not need to be reset unless you change them. So from now on, you should be able to go directly to Audacity to begin recording your assignments. 6
In the next tutorial we ll turn to the matter of making recordings in Audacity. We ll start by recording a sample text to check our settings. Then we ll add recordings to our best sample because each digital file you turn in will contain 4-6 different recording assignments made over a week or two. Finally, we will talk about how to save the digital file and transmit it to your instructor. To return to the main menu, press the Escape key. Total run time: 6:40 min 7