Hello friends ! This is the first of my many Audacity Tutorials. In this one, you are going to learn how to – 1. Download Audacity and Start using it

  1. How to Cut pieces of a song and put them elsewhere.
  2. How to Export files as mp3

This would be a Photo tutorial for now, but I would most probably make it into a video tutorial later on… So keep your eyes peeled.

First of all, to work on audacity, you need to download it. As audacity is a open source program, it is free, so no worries. Here is the download page – Audacity for Windows

If you are using a different OS, choose from this list – Audacity Download
You can dowload the beta version, but I do not recommend this, as it may crash a lot.

So, now you have Audacity. You can easily install it now, just run it. Go on, I am pausing the tut for you 😛

Welcome back! You have Audacity now. You guys can mess around later, but first download the LAME MP3 ENCODER so you can export mp3 files. Go on, do it now!

So, you have downloaded it.. Now we can start working on Audacity! First of all, open it up!!!(Click to enlarge photos)
The screen you see when opening up audacity

Then, if you wish, you can record the audio by clicking on the red button, or you can go to Project > Import Audio, and choose a song. I will record my sound in this tutorial

 
After I recorded the sound  

This is how it looks like when I have recorded my sound.
Now, to cut and paste pieces of the song from one place to another, I will choose the select tool.
Using it, I will click and drag my mouse over the area of the song I want to cut and move.

(TIP : Using the magnifying glass tool near the select tool, you can zoom in by clicking the left mouse button to get a more precise view. Roght Click to zoom out)

Here is a screenie with some sound selected. (Remember that the straight line between the sound waves represent silence)
The darkish piece is the selected sound

Now, click on the cut tool

or press Ctrl+X on your keyboard to cut the piece of sound.

To place it somewhere else, click wherever you want to place the sound with the select tool. A line should appear on that place. Then, click on the paste tool

or press Ctrl+V to place the sound at the selected place.

You are done! Now, save the project by going to File>Save Project as , and choosing the file name an place.If you want to export the file to mp3, keep reading on.

Go to file > Export As MP3.

A box will pop up asking to locate some file.The Lame encoder you downloaded will now come in use.
Go to the folder you saved Lame Encoder, and select the only file shown in that folder.
The Export should carry out now.

Enjoy! You now have

  1. Audacity
  2. Some basic Sound Editing skills
  3. a mp3 and a aup of a sound you edited yourself!