Practical Task Guide

You will need: 

1) The “Jumbled up Goldilocks” audio file downloaded. 

2) To open the programme “Audacity” 

About Audacity 

Audacity is an open-source audio editing software, or DAW (digital audio workstation). Open source means that the software is released non-commercially and available to anyone for free.  

Audacity allows you to edit audio in a lot of ways. You can adjust elements of the audio such as volume, pitch and speed. As well as reorganising the audio by making cuts to the track to keep or remove the elements required. 

In this task you will be asked to use two of the audacity tools you will use most often for editing radio. You will need to cut the audio file into chunks using the selection tool and use the time shift tool to reorganise the chunks into the correct sequence. 

Download the audio file available from the learning resources page. The following audio clip contains a voiceover reading of the children’s fairy tale, Goldilocks and the three bears. The audio file containing the track has all the parts of the story but jumbled up in the wrong order. You must cut the track into little bits or items, to reassemble the story so that it is told in the correct order.  

When starting a new session in audacity, the first thing you should do is save the file to the appropriate folder on your device with the file name consisting of your name and the task name. To avoid a situation of losing work you should continually be saving the file throughout your editing session.  

Then you should use file > import audio > and select the file containing the jumbled reading of Goldilocks.   

Now you will have the track loaded into audacity it is time to “split” the audio. To do this, you will have to listen to the track and decide where one section should start and end. 

To do this you will need to use the selection tool to click on the point in the track you would like to split.  

Now you should click on the track at the point you would wish to make a cut, then go to edit > clip boundaries > split, or Ctrl + I, to separate the audio. You will need to do this for the start of the item and the end.  

Once you are happy with how your items sound, it is time to reassemble them. To do this, you will need to select the time-shift tool. 

By clicking and dragging the selected items you can now move them to whichever position is available in a track. When moving items, you could choose to create a new track underneath the original track, so that it is easier to monitor which items have been moved and which have yet to be reassembled. To do this, go to tracks > add new > mono track, or Crtl + Shift + N.  

Once you have the track reassembled, have a listen all the way through and make sure you are happy with your result and that the story is now told from the beginning to the end. Make any adjustments you may need to. 

If you are finished, you can now click on file > export audio > (export as mp3 if possible, or wav if not) and ensure your name, and the name of the task, is clear in your audios file name.  

Now upload the audio back into the network.