how to podcast.
Start learning

A little help finding your next step

What are you working on?

A few good places to start.

Start hereWhat is a podcast?A plain-English definition: episodes, the RSS feed, subscriptions and how a podcast differs from a video or a radio show.Start hereA short history of podcastingFrom RSS enclosures in 2000 to iTunes support in 2005, the long quiet years, Serial and the video-podcast era.Start hereSeven reasons to create your own podcastWhy people start shows: expertise, community, a voice, teaching, business, creative practice and long-lived archives.PlanHow to podcast: the four PsThe whole process in four stages: plan, produce, publish and promote. Start here if you want the map before the steps.

Press Esc to close.

Audacity lessons

GUIDE 10 OF 17

Audacity lesson 2: the tools and toolbars

The handful of Audacity tools and shortcuts podcasters use every day: selection, zoom, play, split, labels and undo.

Updated

Audacity has a lot of buttons, but podcast editing uses only a few. This lesson tours the ones you’ll touch every day.

The parts of the window

  • Transport toolbar: Play, Stop, Record, skip to start and end.
  • Tools toolbar: the cursor modes described below.
  • Meters: recording and playback levels.
  • Timeline: the ruler across the top. Click it to play from that point.
  • Tracks: each recording appears as a track holding one or more clips, shown as a waveform. The control panel on the left of each track has mute, solo, volume and pan.

The tools you need

ToolWhat it does
Selection toolClick and drag across a waveform to select audio. Most editing starts here.
Envelope toolDraws volume changes over time: handy for fading music under speech.
Multi-toolSwitches between selecting and adjusting envelopes depending on where you point.

To move a clip in time, drag it by the bar along its top edge.

Navigating a long recording

  • Ctrl+F fits the whole episode in the window; Ctrl+1 and Ctrl+3 zoom in and out (Cmd on macOS).
  • Space plays and stops. Click anywhere in a track to set where playback starts.
  • Silent pauses look like flat lines; loud moments like tall spikes. With practice you’ll see mistakes before you hear them.

Labels: mark mistakes while you record

Press Ctrl+B to drop a label at the cursor, even while recording. If you stumble, add a label, pause, and say the sentence again. When you edit, jump from label to label instead of listening to the whole recording. Labels also make good chapter markers for show-notes timestamps.

Splitting and undo

  • Ctrl+I splits a clip at the cursor, so you can move or delete part of it.
  • Ctrl+Z undoes; Audacity keeps a full undo history in View > History while the project is open.
  • Editing in Audacity is non-destructive until you save over your project, so experiment freely.

Next: lesson 3, trimming and editing your recording.