Moving to Linux part 3, audio recording & mixing

I have recently made the move from Windows to Linux. these few articles will hopefully prove useful to others taking the same journey.

Audio Applications
My work with audio is based on my own need to record, mix and produce self hypnosis tracks for download and for use in my own client sessions. There are other far better resources online for how to set up microphones etc.

To record audio
You can of course record audio straight into your Linux laptop or desktop PC as long as it is equipped with a microphone. The quality is unlikely to be very good though. I have, in the past,  used two different recording studios to record voice tracks ready for mixing. However while the quality is excellent it needs more organisation and of course there are costs.

In the end I purchased an Olympus LS11 voice recorder which will save recordings in MP3 or WAV formats.  The files are transferred to the PC over a USB link. However you get those voice files recorded, you'll want a way to edit out the ums, ahhs and random breath noises.

There really is only one tool for this, and that is Audacity. It is available in both Windows and Linux formats. It is a program that you get better at using the more you engage with it (obvious really but you train your ears at the same time). Tips on how to use Audacity are worth a blog post on their own, maybe I'll do that next.

Take a look at it here http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Once you have cut, spliced and otherwise adjusted your voice file, you may wish to mix it with music or sound effects (there are lots of Audacity audio plug-ins freely available as downloads). Audacity can do this but it feels rather clunky compared to a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).

I loved Traktion on the Windows platform but its development seemed to be abandoned for a long time. There now seems to be a Linux version so I'll look at this again.

So after much trial and error I settled on Ardour as my DAW. You can see more details about it here http://ardour.org/

I won't pretend to be an expert in Linux audio, I'm not. It is different to Windows but similar enough that I can get reasonable results.

Start with these few applications and a little bit of knowledge about recording and you'll soon have your own tracks (hypnosis or otherwise) mixed and finished.