# Use Audacity to make your own music mix!



## SouthNJJeff (Oct 9, 2012)

Hi! I am new to the forum and this is my first post.

I was looking for ways to get some decent music together for my front yard on Halloween night to go with my props (which I took ideas from various folks on here; thank you!). I kept thinking that it would be neat to have a piece of music with the sound of zombies in the background. I thought for a while about maybe having a few speakers hooked up to different iPods or whatever to control them but that started to look expensive. I thought about going to work (I work at a casino with a great Audio/Visual Tech department) and having them maybe mix something up for me. THEN I realized that I had the best program already on my computer. I used Audacity to take a bunch of haunting music (Psycho, Alien, I threw the end theme from Dexter in there) and I mixed in a lot of Halloween SFX I got from various sources online as an undertone. Then I saw that someone had written about Vincent Price's rap from Thriller so I used that a few times, with the Friday the 13th SFX (shckkk shckkk schkkk...) before and after. I went a little overboard, making a 31 minute MP3 that's 28.5 MB but I am so pleased at the results. The software is a free open-source program you can get at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ and I think it will help a lot of people with their haunts.


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## RoxyBlue (Oct 6, 2008)

Audacity is very popular with a number of HF members. I've seen several recommendations for it recently posted here.

Welcome to the forum!


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## DirtyZ (Oct 12, 2012)

Could anyone help me with the compression options for Audacity? Seems like my projects get compressed way down when I export to mp3. One track I recently finished was about 2 min. long and was compressed to something like 300k with noticeable sound degradation. Does anyone else also have problems with the way Audacity saves projects you're working on? I was working on one project which had 2 tracks of stereo involved and when I saved the project as a .aup it flattened it to one stereo track. What settings am I missing???


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## Saturday8pm (Sep 5, 2012)

Z, I'm all about overkill, so I export projects as .aiff files then convert them AS .aiff files again using freeware called "Leawo Video Converter" to import into iTunes for Mac. For some reason, iTunes doesn't like Audacity .aiff files imported directly. Could be my personal issue than wholesale for all. I also always save a project, quit Audacity, then reopen to export as .aiff before converting to the second .aiff file. For some reason Audacity doesn't properly export unless I quit it first. It may be because I'm running with less than a gig on me hard drive, LoL ...

My reasoning for doing it this way is simple: you can always prune down file sizes later. Why destroy data before listening to the final outcome? There's the pro in my argument, of course, .aiff files are mammoth and AC-3 files are their more efficient lossless cousins.

So, keep the original file sizes large with .aiff or AC3 then export as more compressed mp file types or however you choose.


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## Buzz (Aug 26, 2011)

Saturday8pm said:


> There's the pro in my argument, of course, .aiff files are mammoth and AC-3 files are their more efficient *lossy* cousins.
> 
> So, keep the original file sizes large with .aiff or AC3 then export as more compressed mp file types or however you choose.


fixed it for ya :winkin:


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## mc967266 (Sep 27, 2012)

I use Audacity almost exclusively when making sound files/background tracks etc (no cheesy Wal-Mart CD's for me!), and I don't have any of those lossy issues when I export to mp3. I find if you mix it right (keeping an eye on your frequencies or else it may speed up/slow down your sounds), exporting it to mp3 (using the LAME encoder) keeps it sounding great at a normal size (a handful of MB's for 3 mins of track or so)......


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## Saturday8pm (Sep 5, 2012)

Buzz said:


> fixed it for ya :winkin:


True that, Buzz!


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