How to Edit Audio Files with WavePad

How to Edit Audio Files with WavePad

You don’t have to be a professional music producer to record and edit your own music. With an easy-to-use music editing software like WavePad, you can take your audio recordings to the next level. Recording and editing your songs yourself is great way to share and preserve your musical masterpieces and anyone can do it. Whether you are recording your voice for a podcast or you are editing tracks of your band playing live music, it has never been easier to create professional quality recordings from home.

Download WavePad for Windows

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Record Audio

If you don’t already have an audio recording to work with, don’t worry. WavePad allows you to record audio directly into the program using an accessory microphone or the internal microphone on your computer or device. To begin recording a new track, simply click the red record button, a new blank track will be created and your recording will begin automatically. You can stop your recording by clicking the square stop button, pushing the Esc key or by clicking anywhere on the track.

Recording Audio in WavePad

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Import Audio

If you already have a pre-recorded track you would like to work with, you can easily import the track into WavePad to edit. Simply press Ctrl + O on Windows or Command + O on Mac to open it. You can also go to the main drop down menu and select File and then Open. Import a file from your computer or external device, or you can choose to open a file directly off of a CD or data disc. You can even import files straight from the Cloud. Make sure to explore the NCH Sound Library for additional audio samples and sounds to add to your music or audio project.

Import Audio Files

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Trim Tracks

Trimming down your audio recordings or music tracks is one of the first tasks you will want to complete when you begin editing audio files. WavePad allows you to easily remove the silences from the beginning and end of your recordings. Simply select your entire track, go to the Edit tab, click Trim, and then choose the Auto-trim silence from the Start and End of the File option from the drop down menu.

Trim Out Silences in Your Tracks 

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Split Tracks

You can split your recordings and files at any point you would like to in WavePad. Simply place your cursor wherever you would like to split your track, select the Split option from under the Edit tab and then choose "Split at cursor" from the drop down menu. This will split your audio at the position of the cursor, generating two separate tracks.

Split Tracks

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Reduce Noise

Removing background noise from your audio tracks is essential if you want to make your recording sound professional. Background sounds such as chair squeaks, footsteps and even your own breathing, are all noises that are easily picked up by your microphone. Luckily, they are just as easily removed from your tracks. Choose the track you want to remove noise from and then select the Cleanup option in the Effects menu. From there you can choose from a variety of noise cleanup options, such as auto click/pop removal or noise reduction.

Reduce Background Noise

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Mix Audio

The Paste-Mix feature in WavePad allows you to overlay tracks to create mash-ups, voice-overs or layer recorded instruments for that full band sound. To combine the audio from two tracks into one, start by selecting one of the tracks and copying it to the clipboard. Next, select your second track and click on the Paste Mix icon in the menu under the Edit tab. When you play it back you will hear that the two pieces of audio have now been combined.

Mixing Audio Tracks 

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Volume Control

Now that your song or voice recording is cut down to the good stuff, you can decide what you want to do with your volume levels. Not all microphones are created equally and so your song may end up being a lot louder or a lot quieter than you expected. Select the Levels tab to view some of the different volume control options available in WavePad. Select Normalize Audio from the effects tab to amplify audio gain across the entire track. This is a great last step to finalize your project before exporting.

WavePad Volume Control Features

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Save and Export

When you are finished editing your audio project, you will need to save it. WavePad has several easy options for saving and exporting your audio files. Under the Home tab you can click on the Save icon and choose to burn your song to an audio or data CD, send the file in an email, upload it to the cloud, or save it as a number of audio file formats. If you plan on making additional edits to your project later, you can save all of your work as a WavePad project file to preserve quality.

Saving Audio Files

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Download WavePad for Windows

WavePad Makes Doing Radio Fun Again

Guest post by Paulette MacQuarrie of Nash Holos Ukrainian Roots Radio

Back in 2002 I was introduced to audio editing software, when the AM station broadcasting my weekly radio show finally went digital and got rid of its reel-to-reel tapes.

It was the end of a romantic era, and I was not enamoured of the change. (Can anyone say "buggy whip"?) But I eventually realized it had ushered in an exciting new era of its own.

The things I could do now! No more razor blades, guesswork, or scrubbing tapes. No more recording shows onto cassette — they could now be archived on a microchip! And on a website for listeners who missed the radio broadcast. (This was before the term "podcast" was invented.)
Best of all, I could record in my own home studio. No more traffic!

I was well aware that as time marched along, my software was becoming dated. Still, it was comfortably familiar. I had become reasonably competent with it, and I hated learning new software on my own. It was hard enough with help!

When the time came to upgrade my computer, however, upgrading my audio software was no longer optional. I discovered to my horror that it was not compatible with Windows7.

One day while in an office supply store in Bellingham, WA I found myself in their software section. A nice-looking box labelled Audio Essentials by NCH Software caught my eye.

The description sounded good and the price was way less than an upgrade for my existing program. And, I recognized the name WavePad as one that a colleague has for years been ranting and raving about, and bugging me to try. So I bought it and once it was installed, it was pretty much love at first sight.

I don’t usually go crazy over software but WavePad cut my production time in half just on my first try. So what’s not to go crazy about?

Working with my old program involved selecting and arranging regions, then doing a mix-down to a Wave file. This resulted in a studio mix that, after all my finicky editing, was considerably more slick than what I had produced on reel-to-reel. And gradually I forgot how much I enjoyed the "performance high" from recording "live to tape" in my pre-digital days.

WavePad has rekindled that excitement while providing more efficient tools for the studio work.

Probably the most useful is "Insert file" (under Edit menu). I can add ready-to-air files (commercials, interviews, etc.), rip tracks off CDs in seconds and copy them in, as well as record my intros and extros right into the file. No mixing down and converting … just save file as an mp3 and I’m done.

Now the fun is back again!

I love the click-saving icons for basics like adjusting volume (Amplify), fading and cross-fading, mixing and pasting files, noise reduction, etc. I especially love how you can zoom in and out with the scroll of a mouse wheel!

WavePad has handy time markers along the bottom of the page and an indicator showing the length of the entire file and selections. That keeps me on track so I have less editing and adjusting to do later.

I still like to work in WAV because it’s uncompressed. The Batch Converter allows me to convert the show and several components to mp3s in a flash, to post on my program website. Skookum!

WavePad has to be one of the most user-friendly programs I’ve ever encountered. The interface is uber-easy and user-friendly. The brief video tutorials are helpful, and the manual is excellent. The support staff are prompt, friendly and helpful. Definitely real people!

Now I’m starting to experiment with MixPad and am finding it a similarly pleasant experience. It’s almost a surprise how fast and easy it is! I’m looking forward to using the other NCH products that came in the package.

My only regret is waiting so long to make the switch!

Author bio: Paulette MacQuarrie lives on Vancouver Island, Canada where she produces and hosts a syndicated one-hour weekly variety show called Nash Holos Ukrainian Roots Radio in (mostly) English. More details at the show’s website www.nashholos.com and blog nashholos.blogspot.com

Localization Efforts Pay Off in NCH International Offerings

It has been about a year and a half since NCH Software put in place a localization initiative in order to offer our most popular software applications in French, German, Japanese and Spanish. The challenges have been many but we now provide numerous applications, including WavePad Sound Editor, VideoPad Video Editor, Prism Video Converter, and several more, in the 4 languages mentioned. Working in cooperation with NCH developers, the localization specialists at NCH translate the general user interface (GUI), test functionality for country-specific appropriateness, suggest changes to implement to better adapt NCH applications to non-English speaking markets. They also translate a significant number of web-based material to make sure that French, German, Japanese or Spanish-speaking Internet users can find relevant information, download and purchase products securely in their own languages.

Bucking the current trend of outsourcing translation and localization and relying instead on "in-house" linguists allows NCH to leverage a valuable internal product knowledge and capitalize on direct interdepartmental relationships to produce more accurate translations, faster.

Please click on the language of your choice to find out more about NCH Software's localized software applications.

• Français
  
• Deutsch
  
• 日本語
  
• Español

WavePad Analyzes Electronic Voice Phenomena

Guest post by Shawna Hunter, investigator with Florida Paranormal Research

I love using WavePad Sound Editor from NCH Software to listen to EVPs, or Electronic Voice Phenomena. EVPs are believed to be possible communication with different entities in the paranormal realm. When investigating paranormal activity audio recordings can be made and analyzed later, sometimes bring sounds and patterns to the surface that I didn't pick up with my ears alone, but after I review the audio, using WavePad, there's an EVP! The opposite is sometimes also true and I will personally hear something with during the investigation that is never caught on the digital audio recorder. It really is amazing stuff.

I use WavePad as a tool to review the audio from our investigations. It is a very user-friendly tool. I can cut a section of the audio, amplify, slow-down, and even loop the clip of audio in question. This enables me to show our clients the evidence in a clip. This is one of the easiest programs to use that I have come across for reviewing audio in regards to the capture of EVPs. I suggest WavePad as a tool to help anyone who is looking for an easy to use audio program for the capture of EVPs from their audio recordings.

Become a part of the investigation: www.thewhitenoiseforum.com

Record Your Own Audio Book

Books on tape have been around a long time, when I was younger we would sometimes get an audio book to listen to in the car on a long trip. Now that people carry mp3 players almost everywhere there is no reason to wait for a road trip to listen to a good book. And, like ebooks, there isn't the pressure to sell huge volumes that is inherent when publishing a printed book, so it is much easier to get into. In fact with just some audio recording software and a high quality microphone you can get started recording your first audio book.

Once you have decided to record an audio book you can start getting prepared. You want to be very familiar with the text. Read first and record second. You can do some editing of the audio after recording, but you want to keep that to a minimum and keep a flow to the prose. Being familiar with the text will help you keep a steady pace. Keep your pace in check, you don't want to zip through it fast so that the listener can really appreciate and hear everything you are reading. In addition to keeping that slow pace, be sure to add pauses after sentences and paragraphs, and beware being monotone. Try to breathe some life into your reading, no one will want to listen to you drone on in a flat voice. Another suggestion would be to consider printing out a hard copy of the book. Unbound, single-sided pages will make page turning easy.

Once you are prepared you just need to schedule yourself a chunk of quiet time to sit down and start recording. You can estimate the total amount of time you will need by timing how long it takes you to read through a single page and multiply by the number of pages. For a longer book you might want to break it out into more than one sitting. A good choice for audio recording is WavePad Sound Editor. By recording directly into an audio editor like WavePad you can easily go in to the recorded audio file when you are done recording to cut out any places you might have stumbled or make any other adjustment that might be needed like amplifying or equalizing the audio file or eliminating any background noise that might have crept in. And if you recorded in more than one session you can merge the files together before publishing your final mp3 file and sharing it with the world.

Give Your Music a Boost: The WavePad Equalizer

I have noticed a lot of questions on our YouTube channel about enhancing the bass in a song using WavePad audio editor. How is it done? Since the graphical interface of WavePad's equalizer was recently updated, now is the perfect time to review how to use it.

The first thing you want to do is load your music into WavePad. Do this by clicking the Open File icon on the toolbar, browse to your music file, and click Open.

Next, click the Effects menu and select Equalizer. This will open the Equalizer dialog, which might not be what you expect if you were looking for knobs and dials. This equalizer still weakens and strengthens frequencies like knobs on a mixing board, but represents the frequencies in graph form. The graph works logically enough; the low frequencies are represented on the left of the graph, the high frequencies on the right. If there is a point on the graph line that is higher, that frequency will be stronger. If the graph point is lower, the frequency will be weaker.

The easiest way familiarize yourself with this equalizer is to make use of the presets. Don't be afraid to play around with them and to adjust their settings to see how they affect your music--you don't have to commit to any changes until you click Apply.

Let's boost the bass as an example. Click the Play button and then select the Low Pass filter from the list of presets. You'll hear the higher frequencies drop down, giving a boosted effect to the bass. The result probably isn't exactly the sound you imagined, so you can make adjustments based on this starting place to even out the sound how you want. You can do this using the Low Pass Options dialog that opened when you selected this preset, but you'll have more control if you close the dialog and move around the graph points yourself. You can also add graph points by clicking on the graph's line.

For more information about how to use the different equalizer presets, view the Effects topic in the help manual. For more information about frequencies, view the General Audio Concepts topic, also in the help manual. The help manual is accessed by pressing F1 from the program.

To try WavePad and boost your bass, download the program from our website. You'll also want to see the other audio software we have for maximizing your audio production.

The Sound of Learning: Using WavePad in the Classroom

We recently cited some tutorials made by a WavePad audio editor user who uses music in language lessons. Now here is another example of WavePad helping in the classroom. This time, in her post The Two Faces of Technology, Kathy talks about using the iPad version of WavePad to record and playback a student's reading to help the student see and hear where they are making mistakes to help them improve their reading skills.

Reading her post actually reminded me of being forced to make audio recordings of oral exams in high school for my Spanish classes. I always found these assignments rather stressful, but I have to admit that it did force me to listen to what I was saying much more closely, and I would go back myself and listen to what I had said and rerecord multiple times before I was happy enough with the final result to turn it in. Kathy mentions that she thinks this would also "be great for teaching storytelling." Can you think of any other places where audio recording or audio editing might be beneficial in the classroom?

WavePad has several applications in the classroom, aside from its recording capability. We have found that instructors and professionals alike use it to create sound clips and soundtracks for their presentations. See how WavePad enhances your teaching, interviewing, and presentations, and download it today.