A friend of mine has just started using Audacity because his ageing hard disk recorder has given up the ghost. Audacity is a pretty good way of experimenting with digital recording and editing without the expense of a full on digital audio production program, because it is free. But because it’s free, there are a few things it doesn’t seem to do.
One pretty crucial thing my friend couldn’t get to work was select a short section of music and mute it. The only options appeared to be muting the whole track, or cutting the track and inserting silence, which wasn’t easy to undo at a later stage. (Someone did suggest duplicating an audio track so you could mute the whole original track, then cut and insert silence into the new track, so that you could revert back to the original later if you changed your mind. Seemed a bit of a faff to me!)
Having a play with Audacity yesterday, I discovered there is a way, that might not be as simple or intuitive as using something like Logic, Cubase or Reaper, but it appears to work and preserve the original sound recording for the future.
To do this you use the “Envelope” function to automatically fade a track out and back in again. When you click the envelope button in Audacity, your mouse pointer changes to an upward facing and downward facing arrow. The next time you click on the audio track it will create a volume event. Click again somewhere else (you need four to make a clean fade out to silence and back in again)
Click once on the audio to set the initial volume level (drag up and down to change this)
Click a second time somewhere else to set the second volume level (again, drag to position the even for time and volume)
Click as many as you like to add steps going up and down as required.
Audacity seems to like putting a gentle curve on the event by default. I’ve not figured a way of changing that, but you can put extra events in if you want to shape this more strictly.
For a piece of free software, Audacity is a very cool tool to play with and if you need to edit audio very rarely, you wouldn’t want the expense (or the learning curve) of using a full-fat DAW.
It’s available here: https://www.audacityteam.org