5 – Combine your Voicetrack with your Soundtrack

Before you start this tutorial, you’ll need to have done the following

  • Downloaded Audacity and the LAME MP3 encoder
  • Familiarised yourself with Audacity
  • Created or Downloaded a Voicetrack with your C25k voice prompts on it
  • Created your running soundtrack

So, got all that? Too easy! Let’s get started!

1. Open Audacity and import your Voicetrack and your Soundtrack. It will look something like this…

soundtrack-and-voice-imported

OK, so that’s great, but if you leave it as it is, you might not hear your voice over the music right? And that would be a problem. So, let’s lower the volume of the music in the places where you are talking.

2. Use the Zoom Tool to zoom into the first part of your voice track. You can clearly see from the blue lines where your voice starts and ends. Use the selection tool in the top left hand corner of your screen to select the section of your music soundtrack

zoom-in-and-select-area-for-deamplifying

3. Go to the “Effect” button on the top left hand side of your screen, and press “Amplify” as shown below.

select-amplify

4. Slide the bar to the left until the top indicator shows around -10.0 as shown below, and press OK.

deamplify

5. Your screen should look something like the one below. Play the track to check that your voice is clearly heard above the music.

deamplified

6. Move onto the next voice prompt on your voice track, (The spot where the blue lines are wider) and deamplify the soundtrack there as well. Repeat until all your voice prompts are done.

7. Go to the “file’ button at the top of the screen and select “Export as MP3.” When prompted, name your track something like “Week 1″ with an Album title like  ”My C25K with Music” and save it in a folder in your Music folder.

Congratulations!! You’ve just created your very own C25k podcast, complete with your own choice of music and voice prompts. One down, nine more weeks to go!!

When you have all your tracks, both with and without music saved in a folder (probably in your “My Music” folder or on your desktop) Be sure to give them all similar names and edit the “Album name” “Author”and other data, by right-clicking on the file and entering the data. This way they will all line up and be easier to find when you put them in your MP3 player. TIP: Use SHIFT to select ALL your files and edit the “Album” and “Author” fields at the same time.

So, what are you waiting for? Upload it to your MP3 player and go for a run!!!

{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }

Rebecca March 4, 2011 at 9:42 pm

Thanks for the tutorials, they made it really clear how to make my own playlists since I’m so clueless on the computer. Excellent!

Laura March 27, 2011 at 11:28 pm

Yay! I did it. Thank you so much:)

Kari May 2, 2011 at 12:45 pm

Thank you SO much for this tutorial! I was agonizing which podcast to listen to (I didn’t care for any of the music) and was thrilled to find your tute. Awesome!

Charley Garrett May 18, 2011 at 12:01 am

This is very cool. I’ve got my first running track done, and this tutorial was exceedingly helpful. In my version of audacity, there is a “control-R” key combination that repeats the Amplify Effect. I found that useful. Thanks a ton for your site.

Ness May 23, 2011 at 5:18 am

Thanks for the tip! I will try that myself, as I have just upgraded to the new version of Audacity myself.

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