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Audacity

By Rudolf Ammann :: December 18, 2003

Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock can lay some fair claim to being the greatest nonsense poem in the English language. I’ve just recorded it (mp3, 1.4 MB) using an outstanding piece of free, cross-platform audio software: Audacity. It allows you not only to make recordings but to edit them as well and to add various sound effects.

At last night’s bonenkai I mentioned the software to a sensei who was greatly interested in recording audio files and distributing them via the Internet but shied away from downloading the software and installing it on his system. For him and for anyone else who might be interested, here’s a quick step-by-step guide.

The following assumes that you’re using Microsoft Windows (that’s Win98 or more recent) — which isn’t necessary since the software is available for Mac and Linux as well. Here goes:

1. Create a new directory on your hard drive, something like c:\downloads (the Japanese version of Windows will probably give you “¥” instead of “\”). This isn’t strictly necessary since you can also download the software to c:\My_Documents (or whatever they call it now). It doesn’t matter, but it’s nice to have a folder for the stuff you download, just to keep some order.
2. Download audacity-win.exe to the directory you’ve just created or to any directory where you’ll find it again.
3. Close any other programs you’ve got running, including your browser.
4. Go to the directory to which you downloaded the .exe file and click on it. This will install the software on your system.
5. This is it. You can now use Audacity and make recordings.
6. If, however, you want to save the things you record in the .mp3 format, some additional steps are required: download the file lame_enc.dll to the directory you created or to any other place where you’ll find it again.
7. Plug a microphone into your computer, fire up Audacity and record something.
8. In Audacity, click on File | Export as MP3.
9. This isn’t going to work because Audacity doesn’t know yet where the lame_enc.dll file is. But it will give you a dialog through which you can locate the file where you downloaded it to. Go there and click the button.
10. You can now save your file as an .mp3. Do it.

To play back audio files on a Windows machine, you might like to use Winamp, which was a free download last time I checked.

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