I’ve been asked a couple of times to make a quick visual tutorial of editing an audio file in audacity.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Audacity is notorious for crashing, so SAVE SAVE SAVE after every edit if necessary. It’s a good habit to get into).
So… without further ado –
I’ll start with the easiest edit, cutting out a portion of the audio on both left and right tracks.


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Next, let’s delete a section of audio from only ONE channel.


This is the MOST IMPORTANT PART about editing audio out of one channel only. You MUST choose silence audio and NOT cut. This way the audio will stay synched.


As a rule, I try to merge the tracks back into a stereo track after I make an edit in one channel as shown above, so here is a screenshot to show how to do that:

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Now, after you’ve done all your editing, you want to make the audio into a stereo track, but you also want the audio to be the same on both channels. Here’s how to do that.





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So those are the basics, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but doing is the best way to learn. Hopefully, this will get you started – or it will fill in a few gaps. I was lucky enough to have a tutorial when I first started out, but without pictures. I thought this might be a nice way to illustrate (literally) how to do the main types of edits.
Any questions? Feel free to comment below. 🙂