Audacity question

To anyone who has used Audacity,

Say I have grabbed a sample from another source that contains the actual sound I want but also various other noises too that I want to remove. What is the best way to go about this quickly and easily? The sounds are all fairly seperate in the sample but I want the end result to be as clean as possible. Is there some sort of automatic way to locate the start and end points of distinct noises in a sample?

Many thanks,
Jason.

Haven't used Audacity but I used to do work with Soundforge which does much the same thing. I did weeks worth of this stuff when I worked at Infogrames - I did a lot of the audio work for Hogs of War.

There's no automatic way of doing it, unfortunately. You need to manually locate and mark off the start and end, then use crop/trim/whatever tool audacity has to extract that part. I used to Copy, then Paste to New, which meant I could always refer back to the original sample for reference, and just work on a copied section of it. Audacity will probably allow you to do this, too.

Trim the sample further once you have a 'rough cut', as you don't want any areas of white noise/silence at the start or end of the sample.

When you've done that you can zoom in, select a fairly small area at the start by click-dragging, then use 'Fade In'. Do the same at the end, and use 'Fade out'.

If you just want to cut out specific sections, just use the crop tool.

If you have overlapping sounds (again I haven't used Audacity), you may also be able to apply filters to cut out specific ranges of frequencies. You could, for example, use this to cut out a distant car engine noise from the sample of a bird tweeting. Just cut out the 'low' end frequencies of the sample, a bit like using a graphical equilizer.

I work by eye.. play it to the point you want to start, then zoom in. you can normally find it pretty accurately that way. :) i've never needed any other tools though there used to be something called BeatFinder or BeatCreator that'd help with drum loops :)

Hello.

Just say 'Neeee' really loudly over the bits that are causing problems and you'll never notice them again.

Goodbye.

Thanks for the tips, most helpful.

Jason.