Basic Podcast Production with Adobe Audition - Lesson 2

In this lesson, we're going to be talking about recording and importing. Now, there's different ways that you can record into Adobe Audition, but we want to make sure that the device that we are recording from, such as a USB microphone or in my case a Zoom L-8 digital mixer that is connected to my computer, that Adobe Audition is recognizing that as the input device. Now, in order to do that, you're going to go find the main Adobe Audition Menu, you're going to go to Preferences, and you're going to choose Audio Hardware. Now on a PC, that will be in a different spot, but you're going to find the same thing for Preferences, and in that dialog box, you'll have Audio Hardware. You want to make sure right here under Audio Hardware that the default input device is that in which you have connected to your computer you want to record from. So I also have a USB Yeti microphone, which is— excuse me— not connected to this computer right now.. But if it was, it would show up in this dropdown list. You can see my webcam is here, but you also got the built-in input and built-in microphone. There are times where it may not recognize initially, or it was disconnected and you plugged it in when the program was open and it didn't recognize it, and it's still set to either no input or the built-in microphone. You want to make sure because you don't want to be recording thinking you're recording from your microphone, but actually it's the built-in microphone on your computer. And that sounds very hollow. So we're going to do that and we're going to click okay. Now, when it comes to recording, let's just say we want to go and we just want to record an initial podcast, single vocal track. So you're doing a solo podcast and you're going to record yourself, or you're going to record yourself doing an opening. We could do that under waveform. And if we click on waveform, it's going to say create a new audio file. I'm going to call this one Test Recording 1. Sample rate, if it's set to 48,000, great sample rate. You don't need to adjust that. I prefer keeping it in stereo. You could go to mono if you want, but stereo is pretty decent to keep it that way. And the bitrate, keep it at 32 float. We're going to click OK. So now we're in that multitrack view. On the very bottom, we got the levels here. You're not seeing any level coming in right now. One tip, if you right-click on this— oh, let's go here and let's right-click. Oh, it's not gonna let me do that at this moment. Let's go ahead first and click Record. Audio detected a problem with the current audio hardware settings. Okay, perfect. So now let's go back up and let's check the hardware settings, see what I did. I'm just going to go and move it off and then move it back on. I'd done a couple recordings prior. There we go, that's what I want. So I was playing with those settings before and that happened. Okay, so on the very bottom here, if we right-click, you want to have this meter input signal show up. Click on that. Now, as you see, I'm talking. So I'm actually recording this screen sharing using the exact same system and the same microphone. So what you're seeing here on the screen is my audio level coming from my mixer. When it comes to levels, you want to look at— you see here when I'm talking, there's a green to yellow. You want your level to go from green into yellow. You don't want it to be super loud and be into the red like that. That's a little too loud. So you adjust that on your input device, the device in which you're recording. I know the Yeti microphones have a level control knob on the actual microphone. My mixer has has an input level. I'm adjusting that so that it's in the right spot. When you're ready, you can hit record. You don't have to hit record and start talking immediately because you will cut any space or dead air or silence off the beginning. So let's go ahead and hit record. Now that we're recording, it's actually starting to build that audio file. So as you can see on the screen, the different waveforms are starting to build and display what it is that I'm talking about. I'm just going to go ahead now and just hit stop. So there, as we see, we have the audio file. If I click anywhere, I'm just going to bring up the computer audio right here so that when I play this back, you'll actually hear it. To play, you can either hit play on the bottom or hit your spacebar. Oh, let's just see here. Same thing happened. Let me just fix that with the output. Do that. Now you won't experience this when you set it up the first time. I just did this recording a couple times and that's why it was doing that. Okay, now I'm going to hit that spacebar. Now that we're recording, it's actually starting to build that audio file. Okay, you don't need to hear me say it over and over again, but you can hear back the audio in which was just recorded. When you did that recording, it adds it over here to the left-hand side so that you can see the files over here. Another way that you could record is within the multitrack view. I tend to do this from time to time because I find it's easier if I'm in here working, which you'll see later on when we start to assemble the podcast, that you can actually record right onto the track. Now, there's a couple different steps for this. As we see here in each track, The arrow that points in means the input. If we choose that and we go here, we can actually say, okay, what input do I want? So it could be input 1, input 3, input 5. I tend to do these in mono at this point. So I'm going to use input 1 because I know on my mixer that is where my microphone is plugged in. If you're using a Yeti microphone or a USB microphone of any kind, It won't say input 1, input 2. It'll actually say that microphone right there. I'm going to choose that. Now you're seeing there's still no levels reading. That's because up on the top here, we got M, S, and R. These stand for mono, solo, and record. We'll talk about mono and solo in another lesson. So we're going to click the R, and now you can see the levels are reading here, and the levels are reading on the digital mixer on the right-hand side. Now, in order to record, I could just hit the record button here, and now it's starting to do the exact same thing it was doing in the waveform window, but now it's recording the file as you see it directly on the multitrack. When I stop, as we see on the left-hand side, it makes another file. Now, if I want to go and see that file, all I need to do is go over to the left-hand side. I can either double-click there or double-click on the file in the multitrack, and it opens it up in the waveform view. So easily able to go back and forth. Let's talk about a recording that you may have had using either Zoom, an external recorder, or another device or file that was sent to you. How do you bring it into Adobe Audition? Well, there's two different ways you can do that. The first is you can go to File, Import, and File, and it's going to ask you to find an audio file on your computer. Or on the left side here, you're double-clicking into the space that is not on one of the files. So if we double-click here, that just brings up the Import File option. Now I'm going to go ahead and let's see if I have an audio file that I could use. Okay, so here's one that was given to me. It's a client project, so I'm going to just choose that right now and I'm going to click Open. It's going to start to import that file. This is a fairly large one, so it's going to take a few seconds for this to go through, read the file, and import it directly into Adobe Audition. Now you can import WAV files, AIFF files, MP3 files, M4A files like this one is. A lot of different files can be opened by Adobe Audition. So you can kind of mix and match those different audio files. Okay, so there's that audio file imported right there. What you want to do is you want to make sure that you have all your audio files imported that you're going to start to work with. Okay, going back to the multitrack. Like I said, you can record here, you can record in the waveform, or you can record or import or record somewhere else outside and import directly into your program for editing. So next, I'm going to show you in the next lesson what we would do to start to cut our initial recording file to make sure that we're, you know, removing any spaces that are unnatural, any ums or any ahs. From that. But in order to do that, I'm actually going to record a sample file that we're going to work with at the start of the next lesson, just as a refresher on how to record. And I'm going to purposely put in some ums and ahs so that we can remove them. I'll see you over there.