How to create your audio files using Audacity!

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This tutorial will help you produce all types of sound files. The first thing you will need is a recording program. Audacity is cross-platform - it runs on Windows (98 through XP), Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, and many Unix platforms, including Linux.

Audacity is a free audio editor. You can record sounds, play sounds, import and export WAV, AIFF, and MP3 files, and more. Use it to edit your sounds using Cut, Copy and Paste (with unlimited Undo), mix tracks together, or apply effects to your recordings. It also has a built-in amplitude envelope editor, a customizable spectrogram mode and a frequency analysis window for audio analysis applications. Built-in effects include Bass Boost, Wahwah, and Noise Removal, and it also supports VST plug-in effects.

• Audacity is free and the source code is available under the GNU General Public License.
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• No limits on the number of tracks or the length of any track, except the size of your hard disk.
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• Import almost anything: WAV, AIFF, Next/AU, IRCAM, MP3, and MIDI files are supported natively, but Audacity will also open just about any uncompressed sound file and automatically deduce the format (using the Import Raw Data... feature).
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• Audacity not only includes many high-quality effects built-in, but also lets you use plug-in effects in the industry-standard VST format. There are dozens of free, shareware, and commercial VST plug-ins online that do everything from Reverb to Noise Reduction.
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• Audacity acts like a non-destructive editor , providing multiple levels of undo, but it also writes changes made to the audio to disk, eliminating the need for complicated real-time processing.
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• Label tracks allow you to annotate waveforms (for example, transcribing speech) and later export the waveforms to a text file.
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• Powerful spectral features allow you to view waveforms as spectrograms or plot the power spectrum of any region of audio, and even export this data to a spreadsheet.

Here is a complete tutorial for Audacity.

How Can I Record Myself?

The first thing you need is a microphone or some kind of input device. Most multimedia computers come with a microphone, but you can also pick one up from any computer or music store. The microphone can be plugged in directly to the sound card in your computer. Most sound cards use a 1/8" Walkman-type headphone jack, so make sure your microphone is compatible with this.