#audacity tutorial

After a long time, I've finally finished making the Blunder in Time tutorial! I hope this is able to help yall create your own audio masterpieces, and I look forward to hearing what you make!

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So I know there's a post about this on Tumblr already that covers a lot of the same ground. Unfortunately, for me, while it does work for most folks, I wasn't able to use it successfully. Not a fault to the creator of it, I think I might just have an edge case/be bad at understanding it + the audacity wiki.

However! I did figure out why my attempts did not work! And I'm going to put it here in as simple as a format as I can.

What I think I was missing and may pose problems:

I was not plugged into the line in jack of my desktop. My laptop does not have a dedicated line in jack, and without that, you may not be able to transfer the recordings over from older devices. Unsure, but so far I hadn't been able to.

My supplies:

Olympus Digital Voice Recorder VN-7100

Audio cable with two 3.5mm jacks. If you have a smaller one and a converter piece, that works too. You just definitely need the 3.5mm jacks somehow.

A computer or device of some kind that has this setup somewhere on it. (I did grab this from the audacity wiki. )

Audacity program for the recording itself.

Line in Symbol for reference:

INSTRUCTIONS in Explain it like I'm Five style (aka as simple as possible so it's not overwhelming!)

Part 1: Plugging it all in!

Connect one end of the audio cable to the headphone jack (may be labeled ear, or have a headphone symbol) on whatever your voice recorder is.

Connect the other end of the audio cable to the blue hole on the computer. That is what's called a line in jack. Symbol listed above/can search it to see it too.

For me, this was on the back of my desktop computer. If you don't have 3 like the picture, you may not have a dedicated line in jack (such as a laptop). You likely can buy an adapter or extension setup for this though, but you do seem to need a dedicated line in jack to do this successfully.

Once plugged into the blue "line in" port, turn on the voice recorder.

Part 2! Using the Computer to transfer!

Open audacity.

There is a microphone symbol with different input options. You are going to chose the "Line in" Option. Mine is "Line In (Realtek(R) Audio)", but yours may be different. The key is the "Line In" aspect.

Hit record on audacity.

Hit play on the voice recorder for whatever file you're trying to transfer.

You should see the waveform that show audio on audacity show up now! If not....unfortunately, idk. This was what finally worked for me. Make sure it's all plugged in correctly and that audio isn't silent on the recorder itself. Also, try restarting audacity with everything plugged in. Sometimes it won't recognize a device unless it was connected prior to starting audacity.

Once the recording is done playing on your analog device, it will show silence on audacity. You can hit stop, and then go to the next file.

Then, hit record on audacity again, and play on the analog device.

Repeat until done with the stuff you want transferred.

Save your audacity file!!!

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Audacity Tutorial for Beginners

Watch Audacity Tutorial >> What is the use of Audacity / how to use Audacity

Audacity is a Free audio editing software available for Windows Mac and linux. If you are new to Audacity, this tutorial will show you how to use audacity for editing audio / sound.

It is absolutely the best and most reliable audio editing…