7. Mixing

After you record your audio,  you will almost certainly want to edit it in some way. This might be as simple as removing a few "ums" and "ahs" from your voices, or outtakes at the beginning and end of the interview, or as complex as combining many different pieces of audio such as different voices, ambient sound and music. Editing can be a very satisfying, creative process in which you produce a unique, cohesive whole out of disparate clips. But it can also be slow and even tedious, and you should rely too much on fixing mistakes in the editor that you could have gotten right the first time in the field. 

Editing software

Audio is edited in a piece of software that is sometimes called a Digital Audio Workstation or DAW, a rather pompous term for... well, audio editor. There are many editors available, both free and paid, and they are mostly built on the same concepts, even if their interfaces and commands are different. Here are a few of the most popular.

AUDACITY is entirely free and open source. It is a bit simplistic and has a clunkier interface than some of the other editors, although it has been improving rapidly since the company that makes it was sold to new management a few years ago. Audacity's strength is making quick edits to a single audio file, rather than multitrack mixing.

 REAPER is very reasonably priced (with a one-time payment) and allows an unlimited trial period. It is very full featured and - in the opinion of this writer - has the most ergonomic design for multitrack mixing and cross-fading clips together. Menus are a little bloated, however, and the interface can be tricky to learn.

AUDITION is an Adobe product, and like most Adobe products is expensive and tied to a subscription rather than a one-time payment. It is an industry standard, however, having been around for decades, (it is a rebranded Cool Edit, one of the first ever multitrack audio editors). Unlike many editors, it allows for both destructive editing (in which an audio file is permanently changed) and non-destructive editing (which applies effects while leaving the original file untouched. 

Multitrack Reaper. Some projects can get pretty complicated, with dozens of tracks and even more clips. 

Audacity

In this module, we're going to learn about the simplest of the editors, Audacity. Although it's a little clunky at times, it can do most of what more expensive software can, and the basic concepts of audio editing are the same across all software. Once you've mastered Audacity, you shouldn't have a problem working with others.

One of the most basic uses for editing software is adjusting the volume level of audio clips.

You can split a single clip into several, allowing you to edit them more easily, delete them and even move them around.

If you create several tracks in your editor you can play two clips at the same time.