Today we’ll get our feet (or maybe our ears?) wet with Audacity.   We’ll practice some basic editing techniques: downloading sound files from the Internet, opening those files in Audacity, layering audio tracks, adjusting volume, cropping, fading, and exporting.

Download both of the following sound files to your desktop (we’ll be working with them for today’s exercise):  a fable, a song.  Our task will to be to combine these two files as separate, layered tracks (we’ll go through this step by step) and to get comfortable with Audacity.  Before you leave today, export your layered sound piece as a .wav or .mp3.  If there’s time, try uploading it to your blog.  Keep the file to less than 2 minutes long.

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Here are links to some other sources for sound files that you can use, for the most part, without worrying about copyright:

• opsound.com (lots of different music genres)
• LibriVox (audiobooks from the public domain)
• ccmixter (creative commons licensed music)
• the freesound project (focuses on sounds, not songs)