For this week’s dispatch, I made a video out of my Audacity window so you can see audio layering in action. Just like in Photoshop or GIMP, layering is where it’s at in Audacity. You can mute them and move them around and turn them up and down. You can apply effects on layers independent of each other.

The way I did this was I recorded my part, then I imported music, a tune called Cat Walk by John Coltrane. (Youtube will probably put ads on the video because of that.) I pulled in the gun shot after that – you can hear a little bit of Moke Blue groaning at the end – and a little bit of found audio that I came across to ad some interest. I took a little time to line all the parts up, then I exported it as an mp3. I used Quicktime to make a screen recording of the Audacity file playing through, then put that together with the mp3 in iMovie. If you look closely, you can see that the audio and video don’t line up properly, but it’s close enough for an amateur.

I do mention at the end that people need to do more commenting. That’s important. Commenting builds community. Commenting is the glue that holds ds106 together. Bosslady Burtis has more words of wisdom for everyone. It’s worth watching.