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Sound file editing

 At today's West of Scotland meeting with thirty three attendees, Chris Cosgrove showed us how he uses Audacity ( a free Open Source software) to record and edit sound recordings.

The Basic toolbar contains icons for Pause, Play, Stop, Goto Beginning, Goto End and Record.



Chris showed how you can select a piece of a recording, remove it and replace with a fixed period of silence.  The ability to add silence is very useful for joining two tracks together with a fade out of the first merging with the fade in of a second.

Copy and Paste commands make sampling from different sound files fairly straightforward and Chris mixed bird sounds, sheep and a couple of train recordings including a reversed section to simulate the train disappearing.

The Audacity help manual is very well written and covers all aspects of using the program.

There are many good sources of audio files including YouTube and the following links.

https://freesound.org

http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk

Chris McCarthy then showed us how he made a track voltage tester built into a 4 wheel goods van.

DCF-WP12 pickups from DCC Concepts were used  and a 2 wire LED display. Excellent little project working on DC and DCC layouts. More details in a later post.



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