Audio Recording

This tutorial is for personal use only of recording youtube music in audacity. Now you have installed Audacity in Linux Ubuntu, let’s try recording music from YouTube and save it to your Desktop.

The following are steps:

Step1.) Launch Audacity (Applications — Sounds and Video — Audacity).

Step2.) Open the YouTube video URL and let it load/stream completely first (do not still hit the record button if the music is still on the process loading because it will drop out during recording session due incomplete/ongoing streaming).

Step3.) Once it is completely loaded, you need to set volume of your Linux computer to above average (above 50% but not more than 80% of the full volume). This will ensure that you are recording it loudly. See the volume indicators to make sure you are not recording it too loudly or else clipping will occur.

Step4.) The default recording format of Audacity is 32 bit float at 44.1Khz. This is the recommended recording format for quality recording. So if everything is ready, hit the Audacity record button first (red circle button). It will start recording , do not panic.

Step5.) Now hit the play button in your YouTube video to start playing the music. Do not stream other media or play other music(from other players). This will let the Audacity capture the stream music from Youtube exclusively.

Step6.) Once it is start recording, you will notice that a sound wave starts to be captured, do not worry if it is too little, you can amplify it later. Example screenshot:

Step7.) Once the played stream music has been completed at Youtube, hit the Audacity stop button to stop recording.

Step8.) You need to save your Audacity project. Go to File –> Save Project. If you see any warning, just click OK. The Audacity project has .aup extension.

Step9.) Type the name of your project and hit save.So even if you close your project, you can re-open the .aup file and you will retain your audio files.

Step10.)Let’s cut the long silence at the beginning and ending of the recorded wave. Using your mouse, start by selecting the long silent section at the start of the recorded wave. Then hit Control X, then press Esc key twice. Screenshot: The long silence are selected (darker areas, starting from 0 second to around 13 seconds of silence).

Screenshot after cutting/removing the silence:

Do the same at the end of the recorded wave using the same techniques discussed above. If the captured audio wave are obviously weak, you can amplify them. Go to Effects — Amplify. Select a reasonable amplification gain, do not overdo as it may clipped resulting to undesirable sound.

Step11.) Save the project again, File — Save Project

Step12.) If you need the music to burn into an Audio CD, you need to change the format from 32-bit float, 44.1Khz to 16 bit 44.1Khz. To do this,

a. Go to File — Export
b. Just click OK, and enter the artist name and song title for meta data
Example:
Artist name: Barbra Streisand
Song title: Memory Karaoke
Then click Add and hit OK.
c. Under options, choose WAV(Microsoft) Signed 16 bit PCM . Screenshot below:

Finally hit save.

Step13.) Try opening the file using your audio player (Rhythmbox for example in Ubuntu). You will notice that it is now a WAV file, you can simply burn this into a CD and it will be included in an Audio CD which you can play with normal CD players.But if you like to export it as mp3, just select “MP3 files” as the file type then click “Option” for the bit rate MP3 settings. That’s it.