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Audacity is not a complicated program, so you should be able to pick it
up rather quickly. It WILL take a little bit of trial and error to
figure out what will work for you personally, but I'm certain that
you'll have it down in no time!
There are four basic buttons that you should be aware of
when beginning with Audacity. They are 'Trim Outside Selection', 'Undo', 'Redo', and the 'Effects' tab.
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Trim Outside Selection: This is a simple tool that allows you
to work with only a small portion of your audio file. It's basically a
'crop' function.
Undo: Whatever you just
did, you can click this button, and it undoes it. What's so cool about
it is that while other programs limit how much you can 'Undo', with
this button, you can Undo forever!
Redo: Accidentally undo something? Well,
click this to Redo it. Simple enough?
Effects: This is where
you can fool around with your sound file. It has many different things
for you to try, but for this tutorial, we'll be focusing on 'Amplify',
'Click Removal', 'Noise Removal', 'High Pass Filter, and 'Low Pass
Filter'.
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To get started, the first thing that you have to do is open your sound
file. That's easy to do. Go up to the top left hand corner of the
program and click the little tab that says 'file'. When you do that, it
will open another menu. The second selection in that new list will be
'Open.' Click that and browse to find your sound file, and open it up.
The first thing that you'll want to do with any audio file
that you think may have an EVP is listen to it in its entirety. Don't
cheat. Really listen to it. When you hear something that you think may
be an EVP, you're going to want to separate it from the rest of the
file, and get down to bid-ness.
If you look below, there's a picture that displays 3 steps to separate
your EVP from the rest of your file.
Step 1: Find your EVP
Step 2: Click
and drag your cursor to highlight your EVP. Don't be
afraid to highlight more than your EVP. You can always do this again
to be more accurate.
Step 3: Click the 'Trim
Outside Selection' button. It's that simple. If you mess up,
just click 'Undo'.
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Cleaning
| WARNING:
Do
NOT go overboard with cleaning your EVP. It is VERY easy to take it too
far, and completely ruin the integrity of your file. Also be careful
not to allow it to sound mechanical or robotic. |
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At
the top of Audacity, there are a bunch of buttons in a fashion that
you'll find on pretty much every window on your computer. The first one
in the top left hand corner is 'File', then 'Edit', then 'View', and so
on. Click the one that says 'Effect'. The menu will come down
with a lot of other choices. I've supplied a picture of it for you to
the left. I've also marked the effects that we'll be using in this
portion of the tutorial.
Before attempting to use any of these, make sure you have the section
of your audio
file that you want to work with highlighted by clicking and dragging on
it.
Click Removal
This one is going to boil down to trial and error. When you open this
window, you will have 2 slide bars to play with. One is called 'Select
Threshold'. the other is called 'Max spike width'. With this one, all
you have to do is experiment with those bars and see what it does to
your audio. You'll find a setting that works best for that particular
file.
Noise Removal
Noise removal is a little more complicated. The window is pretty self
explanatory. It will tell you, 'Step 1, Get noise profile'. Click that
button. Then, highlight the part of the file that has the noise that
you want to get rid of. Open the 'Noise Removal' window again. Go to
Step 2. This is where you should be careful not to make your file sound
distorted. Use the slide
bar to remove noise. |
High
& Low Pass Filter
With High Pass Filter, you can remove LOW frequency sounds
from your file. With Low Pass Filter, you can remove HIGH frequency
sounds from your file. This is a fun toy. With each filter, you'll have
another slide bar, and a field with a number. This
number represents your chosen frequency.
With High Pass Filter, whatever frequency value is shown in the box,
the filter will remove ALL noise from your file that is BELOW that
frequency.
With Low Pass Filter, whatever frequency value is shown in the box, the
filter will remove ALL noise from your file that is ABOVE that
frequency.
Play around with it. Like I said, it's a fun little toy.
Amplify
In your
effects menu, the first option is called 'Amplify'. You want to make
sure that you always do your cleaning BEFORE you do any amplification
on your file.
This one works the same way as the others with a slide
bar. Just highlight your area, and amplify it.
That's it.
Thats the end of the tutorial. There's a bit more
that can be
done with the program. If you want to learn more, I'm sure there are a
lot more in depth articles about it on the net, but for EVP work, this
really should do the trick for you. If you're interested, play around
with some of the other effects. For being free, it's a really
good program.
I hope that this has helped you. |
GREAT
SUCCESS!
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