Audacity Tutorials - How to use Audacity - Part 8 - Exporting
In this Audacity audio recorder and editor tutorial, we discuss how to export your Audacity project into a final format including MP3 and OGG formats. You need to install the Lame software which we’ll discuss
Start by opening Audacity and the new window opens. Let’s open our recent file, which has multi tracks of water, acoustic guitar and the vocal. So, we are first going to take a quick listen (Plays the multi track of Guitar, water and the vocal). That’s the greatest project ever made and also good enough for an example here.
Now, go to File > Export as WAV, which will prompt us about mixing down to two stereo channels, and we are OK with it. Now it will prompt for saving the file. Choose the desired folder and give it a name. You could see the WAV extension automatically added, while saving the file. Let’s save it as ‘Multi’ for right now, which will be a .WAV file. So, click on Save. It’s just to add quickly, to export into the folder as WAV.
You may note that Export Selection As Wav in File menu is not highlighted. To activate it, select a portion of a track, in this example ‘water’, and click on Export Selection As Wav, which will export only the ‘water’.
If you want to use WAV for burning CDs, you have to export it as a WAV, and then import it to whatever software you use for burning CDs. There are two key things to note here. First thing is, make sure Project rate down here at the left is 44100. And, the second thing is in
Edit > Preferences > File Format, make sure that your export is 16bit. Once confirmed, click OK.
Now, let’s move on to Exporting as MP3. When you click on File > Export as MP3, it will warn about mixing down to stereo channels. Click OK there and select the folder to store the file. In this example, it is stored in ‘Samples’ folder, file name as ‘Multi’ and with extension MP3, which is picked automatically by the system. The first time you do this, you will get a prompting, asking to download the LAME library. Click on NO, since you don’t want to have it loaded.
You now need to go online to download the LAME software. Start, by going to the LAME website, which is http://lame.buanzo.com.ar/. Now scroll down and select the download that’s right for you. In this example, we are selecting ‘Lame V3.98.2 for Audacity on windows.exe’. So, click on that and on the security warning click Run and go ahead and download it. The security warning pops up again, click on Run, which will take you to the LAME wizard. You might want to read through and accept the agreement. Now select the location for the file. In this instance, C:/Program File is chosen. Now click Install and then Finish, which is easy.
Now close this window and move back to Audacity.
Now, once again File > Export as MP3, click OK on the warning and save the file as ‘Multi’ with extension MP3. Now when the LAME library prompt comes up, we are going to search for it. So, go to C:/Program Files where you will find ‘Lame for Audacity’ folder. Open the file on it, where you can give the MP3, a name and the title. In this example, we are naming it as ‘Audacity Example’, in Artist, it’s named as ‘Myself’, Album as ‘Tutorial’, Track number as 1, Year as 2009, in Genre ‘Other’ and then click OK. Now our MP3 is exported.
We do the same thing for Egg Vorbis. Click File > Egg Vorbis, which prompts about mixing down to stereo channels. Click OK and choose the file name as ‘Multi’ with extension .ogg and click Save.
Finally, if you want to export multiple projects, go to File > Export Multiple. This is good to write CDs, if you want to export a bunch of songs. You can export all the songs individually and then burn them on separate tracks in a CD.
That’s how easy it is to export to Audacity.
