Using a Computer for Recording

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to show you how to use your computer for recording. First thing that you need to have in order to record music or any other type of recording on your computer, is some type of microphone. I have a, a little small one here that has a, eighth of an inch plug in for mini and my laptop here; some laptops have their own little built in microphones. I know mine does because you can see a little icon of a microphone right next to the microphone jack. So once you have your some sort of a microphone, let's go to our computer; we're going to actually start recording. The first thing that's easiest to use is built in the Windows, it's called the sound recorder. If you click on start, go to all programs; let's find accessories and then just click on sound recorder. And so now as you can see while I'm talking, you can actually see that level here is actually moving as the microphone is picking up what I'm saying. So if I click start recording, it's going to actually start recording everything that the microphone pulls in and it's going to save that instead of going to tape or anything like that. It's going to save it as a digital file on the computer. So let's click stop recording and I'm going to save this on my desktop as example. So now here's our recorded file. I'll just double click on it; and as you can see it is playing back my recording. Okay. Another tip is to use a program called Audacity which is a free download. Just go to your Internet Explorer and on Google's website or any other web search engine that you prefer, just do a search for Audacity and then you'll find an Audacity free audio editor. You can go there and you can download this program. This is a multi track recording program; I'm just going to open it up here. Now what multi track means is you can record multiple tracks and then mix them together. So I'm just going to start recording here and as you can see it's, it's picking up what I'm recording and just playing it. I'm going to stop and play back and it's playing back now. Even though I have that recorder, I can record a separate track, I'm just going to snap my fingers and now when I play it, it'll play them both together. It's that easy to record sound on your computer. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just showed you how to record using your computer."