Music, Sound Effects, Tech News, and More — The AudioMicro Blog

Creating to 10 lists can be tough. We found a new site that makes it as easy as ever. Not only can you create top 10 lists easily, but you can even create top 500 lists with a few simple clicks. The embedded widget below came from our friend’s over at Ranker who have compiled a nice list of the top 500 Music Artists of All Time. To make your own top 500 list, head on over Ranker.com and create your own.

In this post, we’ll show you a beginner’s look at how to use Audacity, one of our favorite audio editing programs – an easy to operate, downloadble freeware program.  Audacity is an essential for musicians, sound designers, artists, or anyone simply because it is so easy to use and the user can accomplish so much. It is compatible with both Mac and Windows operating systems. In this post, we’ll go over some major basics for operating Audacity.

First thing’s first, you need to open up an audio file. Audacity supports mp3, aiff, AU, and wav files but you’ll find that mp4s are not so compatible. Once an audio file has been loaded into the program, you’ll see a set of waveforms that represent that sonic profile of your clip. If you see one row of waveforms, that indicates the audio file is mono. If there are two, it’s in stereo format. Here is a look at the Audacity interface.

The top tool bar has many different icons that are all pretty self explanatory just from the way they look. There are playback buttons, which include the standard record, play, pause, fast forward, and rewind buttons. Input and output volume sliders are also located on the top tool bar. These are for adjusting volume levels of your microphone input and speaker output respectively. Now it’s time to start editing your audio.

Highlight a piece of your clip by dragging your cursor across where you would like to highlight. Towards the top right side of the tool bar you will see several editing buttons. From left to right they are cut, copy, past, trim outside selection, trim inside selection, undo, redo, zoom in, zoom out, fit selection to window, and fit project to window. Become familiar with these operations by simply experimenting with them and your audio clip. Audacity has many audio effects that you can apply to your clip including fade in, fade out, normalize, reverse, and many more. You can even use Audacity to mix two songs together.

Once you’re done editing, simply export your clip as a .wav or mp3 file and enjoy! Many of the users who have contributed to our royalty free music library use Audacity to edit their tracks. New versions of audacity are released frequently so keep checking for updates.

On Wednesday, September 9th, for the first time ever, the music of the Beatles makes its way onto a video game console and quite frankly, it’s about time! After several years of production and development from rhythm game pioneers Harmonix, The Beatles: Rock Band will be released for the big 3: Xbox 360, Wii, and PS3 next week. The game contains 45 classic Beatles tracks that span the band’s entire career starting from “I Wanna Hold your Hand,” through”I Am the Walrus,” and all the way to “Get Back.” There will also more downloadable content including full Beatles album downloads pending the games release.

The Beatles Rock Band game looks like an exciting and refreshing addition to the Rock Band franchise, not to mention the fact that its got to have one of the coolest TV ads, EVER.

Perhaps the release of this game will give Rock Band a boost in the battle against Guitar Hero. In the past, Guitar Hero has released special expansion games featuring one particular band. Guitar Hero: Aerosmith was release shortly before Guitar Hero: World Tour, and the newest installment in the GH franchise has been an entire game devoted to Metallica. As big as Aerosmith and Metallica are, no one compares to the Beatles, and Rock Band definitely has an advantage with acquiring this legendary library.

Simultaneous with the relesae of the Beatles Rocd Band game comes a big new annoucement and music event from Apple, where everyone is predicting that Steve Jobs will announce (with Paul and Ringo in attendance) the Beatles catalogue finally being made available on iTunes.  It’s the moment we’ve been waiting for since the start of the digital music era – legally available music online from the greatest band of all time.

Now we’ve been working hard to recruit new artists here and uploads have definitely been on the rise despite our heighted editing stardards. Nothing we’ve go touches the Beatles in terms of popularity, but if you are looking for classic rock and royalty free pop music, be sure to check out the Pop genre on the Stock Music tab.