Amateur Voice Recording: Audio Editing by Selecting and Deleting

When making a recording of your voice that contains some errors, you need not start over. The most basic audio editing technique for the spoken voice is selecting a portion of audio and deleting it.

Recording for Easier Audio Editing

While recording your voice, remember that you can edit the audio later. When you make a mistake, repeat the sentence correctly. Some errors may sneak through, but this preparation greatly speeds audio editing. Deleting bad takes to leave an existing good one is much easier than inserting a new take.

Selecting

Audible clicks result from selecting improperly while editing a voice recording. Sound is a smooth, continuous pressure wave. When audio editing makes the waveform discontinuous or not smooth, it causes a noticeable clicking sound. See the attached image for good and bad examples.

Making a good selection in a voice recording involves two steps. In the first step, observe the waveform and listen to the audio to make a rough selection.

Audacity provides three options to make a rough selection, and most or all audio editing software should have similar methods. First, hold the primary mouse button while dragging the mouse pointer over a section of a voice recording, and you will select that section. Second, you may click the primary mouse button at one end of the selection, then Shift-click at the other end, selecting the portion between the two clicks. Third, you may type starting and ending times (or the start time and the length) into fields at the bottom of the window.

The second step in selecting a portion of a voice recording, in order to prevent an audible click, is to line up the ends of the selection with places the wave crosses zero. In Audacity, a simple tool called "Find Zero Crossings" does this automatically. Any worthwhile audio editing software will have a similar tool.

Deleting

After making a selection and finding zero crossings, make sure the selection is correct. While audio editing, do not simply presume the selection is right. People make mistakes, and find zero crossings may move the selection boundaries more than expected, so the selected region may be incorrect. To preview a small portion of the voice recording without the selected region, hold the Control key while clicking the Play button.

If the selection is correct and the preview sounds good, the press the Delete key. As expected, this action will remove the selected region from the voice recording.

Amateur voice recording and audio editing are simple and rewarding if approached correctly. As easy as the art of selecting and deleting audio is, it is one of the most basic and useful audio editing techniques.