Okay, so today I wanted to mess around with recording some audio, specifically focusing on getting stuff from Damon Jackson’s fights. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, so I finally dove in.
First, I gathered my materials. This was pretty basic: my laptop, a decent microphone (nothing fancy, just a USB one I had lying around), and some audio editing software. I’m using Audacity because it’s free and I’m familiar with it. I also made sure I had a quiet space to record, which is always harder than it sounds with kids running around!
Next, I needed the source material. I went to find some of Damon Jackson’s fights, pulled up the ones I wanted to focus on.
Then, the recording part. I basically just hit record in Audacity and played the fight audio through my speakers. I tried to keep the levels consistent, making sure it wasn’t too quiet or too loud – I could see the waveform in Audacity, which helped.
- Positioned the mic a few inches from the speakers.
- Adjusted the input levels in Audacity until it looked good (not clipping).
- Hit record and let it run.
I did a few test runs first, playing back short sections to make sure everything sounded okay. It took a couple of tries to get the mic placement and levels right. I also realized I needed to turn off all notifications on my computer – those little “dings” are annoying when you’re trying to record clean audio!
After recording a few different fight segments, I went into Audacity and started cleaning things up. This mostly involved cutting out any dead air at the beginning and end of each clip, and maybe adjusting the volume a little bit if one part was significantly louder or quieter than another.
Finally, I exported each segment as a separate file. I just chose WAV format for now, since it’s a good quality, uncompressed format. I could always convert them to MP3s later if I needed to.
It wasn’t rocket science, but it was a fun little project. Now I’ve got some clean audio clips of Damon Jackson’s fights, which I can use for… well, whatever I want! Maybe some video editing later? We’ll see!
