Podcasting Howto: Using Audacity to duck music behind voice tracks

25th January 2008, 12:55 pm

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts on a wide variety of topics lately, getting ideas for how faculty can integrate podcast creation into their own classes. One thing I’ve noticed is how polished and professional some podcasts sound - since I want our faculty to be able to produce professional-sounding media, I’ve been trying to identify specifically what separates the professional from the amateur. While many things seem to play a part in that professional sound, one consistent feature I can easily teach and replicate is the use of music. Some podcasts use only intro and outro music, others use music to indicate section breaks, and still others play constant, faint background music. However, all professional-sounding podcasts using music share one thing in common - ducking or fading music behind the voice track(s).

We’re promoting Audacity for basic audio recording and editing, so I looked into how to achieve ducking in Audacity. While there are several ways to duck or fade music, the most professional-sounding method involves the use of the envelope tool, which fades the volume of a track to a constant low level, then fades back to the original loud level. It’s pretty easy to use once you’ve gone through the steps; since video is much easier to follow than text-based documentation, I whipped up a screencast demonstrating the envelope tool, which I’ve embedded below. Tell me what you think.

As an aside, I also used this opportunity to play around with some alternative video upload services. Out of all the ones I tried, I liked Revver’s embedded video object the best. It’s interesting to see how some video services use more compression than others when transcoding the .avi I uploaded into .flv. Here’s the services I tried:

Do you have a favorite video upload service I didn’t try? Tell me about it - I’d love to test it out.

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Category: Podcasting, Video  |  4 Comments

Installing Audacity and LAME in one step

4th June 2007, 03:49 pm

A friend recently had an interesting problem - he wants to promote the use of podcasts to instructors as a component of courses taught online, and identified the excellent, open-source Audacity as their Windows tool of choice. However, as he began writing documentation for installing and using Audacity, he realized many instructors would be immediately turned off by the complicated installation process required to set Audacity up for exporting projects as mp3 files - many instructors who could otherwise be taught how to record and save projects would not understand how to unzip LAME, copy the DLL file into Audacity’s folder, then point Audacity to the lame encoder. Instead of writing thorough documentation that would likely daunt non-savvy instructors, I suggested an alternative - creating our own installer. It worked so well, I thought others might benefit from the idea.

First, a word about licensing.
I originally wanted to provide the one-step Audacity/LAME installer as a downloadable file, but started reconsidering after looking into license issues. Audacity and LAME are themselves covered by GPL/LGPL and therefore are re-distributable; however, I can’t tell what the SetupStream license terms are, and the patent mess covering the mp3 format may prevent distributing a package that installs Audacity with built-in mp3 output. Since I can’t really tell, I listed the steps required to make your own installer, and you can choose how you use or distribute it.

Step 1
First, I downloaded the tools I’d need. Since I was creating a custom installer, I needed the zipped version of Audacity, not their installer. Additionally, I needed LAME and an installation creator with the ability to insert registry keys. After trying a couple install creators, I chose SetupStream - it’s easy to use, freeware and offers a wide array of features, including all those I need.

Step 2
Next, some preliminary steps: unzip Audacity into its own folder, then unzip the file lame_enc.dll from the LAME zip file into the the same folder that contains Audacity.exe. Install and start SetupStream, select Create New Setup and click Next.

setupstream step2

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