Translation in progress, come back soon!

Today I’ll talk about a very useful program, which function is to edit audio tracks with many different purposes, from mounting the sound effects of a videogame to record yourself with your music group playing a song on multiple tracks.

The program is Audacity, it’s licenced by Creative Commons and it has Mac, Linux, Windows and other OS versions.

Now I’ll teach you how to use Audacity to mix two audio tracks.

First we open the program, we click File > Open and we select the audio file we want.

Now we’ll see the complete track, probably 2 tracks, it depends on if it’s stereo or mono. How you’ll probably know, stereo uses a left track and a different right track to give a sense of depth, while mono uses only one track for all.

We select the begining of the part we want to keep, and we drag the mouse to the begining of the track. Then, we press Ctrl+K (Cmd+K if you’re on a mac) to erase this part. We do this too from the ending part we want to keepof the track. (if Ctrl+K doesn’t work, use Edit > Delete).

Now we have to have only the part of the track we want to keep.

We press Ctrl+I (Shift + Cmd + I if you are on a mac) or Project > Import Audio (File > Import > Audio on Mac), we’re gonna add a new track to our mix.

We repeat the last process to keep only a concrete part of the track, and now we’ll have both tracks at the start of the file, so we’re gonna have to move one of them forward (unless they have to sound at the same time).

We click the start of the track we want to move forward, just in the second 0, and we click in Generate > Silence…, where we will put more or less the duration of the first track in seconds (to move the second). It’s better to put a bigger number, because we will select the extra part and we’ll delete it the same way we have done it before. If we want to add another track, we repeat the entire process.

Maybe it has to be fix it up a bit, but here you have your first musical “mix”.

I hope this tutorial has been useful to you, later I will teach you how to record a track, and some effects you can apply.

Bye!

Hello readers!

As you know, I mean… as you will know after reading this, I usually develop videogames. And videogames have coloured stooges and unfriendly enemies, but also other things, like music.

And… where I get the music from in my games?

I make it for myself, with my computer, in a format called MIDI.

MIDI the acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. It’s a “sound” format (actually it isn’t) which can give us several advantages. A MIDI file takes almost no space in disk, and it can be edited, with multiple tracks, in the same format it can be played. Some years ago, cell phones had a very low memory, and all ringtones were MIDI files.

We’re talking about plain code, interpreted by the MIDI controller of the computer (of other device) and played depending on the soundfont installed in your computer. This is, the file doesn’t save real sound data, but it saves instructions for the controller. Soundfonts would be similar to a normal text font, but soundfonts indicate how to play the sounds, instead of the shape of the letters.

There are so many programs for the task of composing MIDI music. I also tested many programs, and I took one: Anvil Studio.

It’s a program that didn’t attract me at first sight, (because of its graphics and its interface), but I decided to keep it once I tested it. Its cost is… nothing, because it’s Freeware.

Give it a chance and you will get caught in music composing!

Once you have composed your MIDI song, you may want to improve the sound quality, because MIDI’s song depends of the soundfonts installed on each computer. For this I use a MIDI to MP3 online converter (it can convert to WAV too, but I think nowadays nobody uses this format), in Hamienet.