WavePad Audio Editing Tips & Tricks

Below you will find a compilation of some the audio effects and sound editing basics for the WavePad audio editor that you will want to know and test out for yourself as you delve into the world of audio editing. Another great way for those new to audio editing to get started is by watching the WavePad sound editor intro video tutorials so you can see the audio editor in action.

Split and Cut Audio Files

You can split a file at any point you choose by simply clicking the Split button on the Edit tab. This will create two audio files split at the point you had the cursor. Be careful when you use this function, the action cannot be undone. Additional audio splitting options include splitting at bookmarks, splitting at silences and similar Trim options that delete sections instead of creating new audio files.

Amplify Audio Volume

To make audio sound louder, instead of simply turning the volume control up you want to amplify the file. You will find Amplify on the Effects tab, which will open a window where you can either adjust the amplification using the slider or by selecting a preset level from the drop down menu. Selecting 200% will double the volume, 50% will cut the volume in half.

Equalize Audio

Amplifying affects the full spectrum of the audio in a file, but if you want to increase or decrease certain frequencies, for example, boosting all of the lower bass frequencies, then you want to use the Equalizer. The Equalizer is also on the Effects tab and opens a graph of the frequencies going from low to high frequencies as you move left to right. This gives you very finite control of the frequency ranges you want to control. Moving a point up will make the frequency stronger and moving a point down will make it weaker.

Normalize Audio

Normalizing an audio file is similar to amplifying, except that normalizing increases the sound of the loudest peak to the maximum level without causing clipping in digital audio. This is frequently used as a last step before saving a final version of an edited song or recording. To normalize an audio file, you will find Normalize on the Effects tab.

Fade In and Out of Audio

Fading in and out of an audio file will help acclimate the ear to the background noise of a file. To fade in, select a region at the beginning of your file, then select "Fade in" under Fade on the Effects tab. Similarly you can select "Fade out" with a region at the end of your file selected. A good tip is to fade in quicker than you fade out because the ear expects to hear the initial audio quickly, but abrupt transitions to silence at the end can be jilting.

Remove Background Noise

Since not every audio recording is made in a sound studio environment, you often get unwanted background noise in recordings. To remove background noise you want to take advantage of the Cleanup options on the Effects tab. Specifically, under Noise Reduction try using Audio Spectral Subtraction and then Multi-band noise gating. If the presets don't give the results you want, try using lower levels on these reductions until you find a combination that leaves only audio you want to keep.

Remove Vocals

You will find an option to Reduce Vocals under the Voice button on the Effects tab. This will open a dialog box that allows you to change the pan position and width, the vocal level, and preserve the bass. Generally the default settings will work the best, but different songs may require different settings to effectively reduce or eliminate the vocal frequencies, so if you don't get the results you want, try adjust these settings until you are satisfied with the result.

Layer Audio & Voiceovers

WavePad won't allow you to record directly over another file; highlighting a file and clicking record will replace the selection. Depending on how much mixing you want to do, you may want to consider moving to MixPad audio mixing software, but for some basic audio mixing within WavePad you want to use the Paste Mix feature. Copy the audio you want to add to your file to the clipboard, then select all in the file you want to add it to, then select Paste Mix on the Edit tab. This will open a window with options on what to do if your files are not the same length. When you click OK the two pieces of audio will be combined.

Sound Effect Library

Find audio clips and sound effects to add to your audio projects in the NCH Sound Effect Library. Open the Sound Library from the Tools tab. This opens a new window where you can preview and download sound effects and royalty-free music clips.

Audio Effect Plugins

In the Windows version of WavePad you can add DirectX and VST plugin effects to further expand your audio editing capabilities. Find the options to add and use VST and DirectX plugins on the Effects Tab. VST Plugins will open their own interface where you can adjust the settings, while you will need to go into the settings when selecting a DirectX plugin for the effect to be applied when you click OK. Get started with this list of free VST plugins you can download and use with WavePad.

FFT Sound Analysis

All of the audio editing features outlined above are all easy to put into action, but don't let that fool you into thinking that WavePad doesn't have a lot of power under the hood. One of the more advanced areas you can explore are the powerful audio analysis tools for examining the spectral content of audio. Learn about the FFT and TFFT audio analysis graphs and what they represent to start to get your feet wet. These tools can be used in many fields, including linguistics and mathematics, in addition to sound engineering.


If you have any other tips, favorite features or advice of your own, please comment and share them below.

Audio Effect Plugins for WavePad Sound Editor

In addition to the wide range of audio editing features and effects built into WavePad Audio Editor, you can also add plugins to further expand your Audio Editing possibilities. WavePad supports both DirectX and VST plugin effects, providing access to thousands of additional audio tools and effects.

VST Plugins

VST or Virtual Studio Technology, is a standardized way of adding effects to digital audio editing programs like WavePad. To add a VST effect to WavePad choose VST on the Effects tab, which will open the VST plugins window. In this window browse to the directory on your computer where you have saved your VST plugins (note that the plugins must be DLL files). When you have a folder selected, the list of VST effects in that directory will populate the VST Plugin list, so you can use the drop down list to select your plugin. When you click OK, the VST plugin will open in WavePad and you can make any adjustments to its parameters and continue to edit the waveform, but now the audio you hear is being processed by the VST effect. To save the effect, click the Apply button on your effect which will close the effect and save the audio with the effect added.

DirectX Effects

Similar to VST, DirectX plugins are another standardized way to connect audio synthesizers and effects to audio editors. These plugins do not have their own interfaces, but pass and process the audio behind the scenes. Also, as with the VST plugins, you will find DirectX on the Effects tab, and clicking on it will open a window with a list of the DirectX plugins detected on your computer. Select the effect you want from the drop down menu and click Settings to make changes to the configuration settings, and click the OK to apply the DirectX effect to your audio.

There is a world of extra effects out there that you can use when you start exploring VST and DirectX effects. To get you started we have a list of free VST plugins available online for you to download and try with WavePad, but this is just the beginning. There are lots of other plugins available that you can use with WavePad Audio Editing Software to further enhance your audio editing projects.

Note: currently plugin support is limited to the Windows version of WavePad

Adding an Audio Voice Over with WavePad

If you want to record a your voice over a piece of music you have two choices in the NCH Software audio suite. MixPad recording and mixing software is the more advanced program, that will allow you to record multiple tracks, and fine tune the mixing of the music and vocal tracks, but you can also try the Paste Mix feature in WavePad audio editor for quickly combining to files.

WavePad doesn't allow you to record directly over another file, highlighting a file and clicking record will end up replacing the selection. Instead, use the Paste Mix feature to combine two audio files into a single track.

Copy the recorded voice over to the clipboard, then select all in the audio file you want to add that voice over to and click Paste Mix on the Edit Tab.This will open a window with options on what to do if your files are not the same length. If the Mix Audio�which is your voice recording on the clipboard�is the shorter of the two files, you can ignore the options and click OK. If the Mix Audio is longer, you need to decide what to do when the audio you are mixing into is finished. When you click OK the two pieces of audio will be combined and when you press Play you will hear both files.

VideoPad: Video Editing Excellence

We are very proud of the fact that even though VideoPad hasn't broken into the top three on TopTenReviews' list—yet—they have awarded our video editor for excellence. With each new release we strive to add more of the advanced features professionals crave, and just as importantly stay easy to use. That user-friendly quality that allows everyone to make movies is in a large part what TopTenReviews has noticed and is recognizing:

"Using VideoPad requires little effort. Before we even looked at the manual, we were able to create a video. To add transitions, effects and more, all you have to do is drag and drop them in place ... Overall, VideoPad has some excellent features. It can import files directly from many types of devices and it has 3D and green-screen capabilities. It is easy to use and has basic editing tools."
    �  TopTenReviews

If you haven't tried VideoPad video editing software yet, why not download a copy today. We think you will agree that VideoPad is both an excellent and easy video editor. Those of you who are already VideoPad users remember you can always send us suggestions on how we can make VideoPad even better. With your help those other video editors better watch out, because we plan to keep moving VideoPad forward and raising the bar on video editing excellence.

Make "Picture-in-Picture" Videos with VideoPad

The picture-in-picture (PIP) effect is commonly used in videos where more than one set of images is shown simultaneously in order to tell a story or convey additional information. Picture-in-picture is frequently used as part of news clips and in instructional videos.

The PIP effect can easily be achieved using VideoPad Video Editor software (version 3.0) by adding the video clip you want to overlay as your picture-in-picture onto the timeline so that it is positioned above the video you want to serve as the background in your video.

With this clip selected in the timeline, click on the "Effects" button then choose "Motion" from the drop-down menu at the top of the dialog box. Use the "Scale," "Position X" and "Position Y" controls to adjust the size and placement of your clip. You will be able to see the position and size change in the preview window on the right side of the Effects dialog box.

When everything is positioned the way you want it simply close the dialog box to apply your changes. Then, when you preview your movie, you will see your re-sized and re-positioned video clip overlaid on top of the larger clip.

Creating a picture-in-picture video in VideoPad is that easy. Use the same process to position images on the screen, making it an easy way for businesses to add their logo to videos.

Something to Talk About

Below is a word cloud generated from our posts here on the NCH Software: Do More with Software blog. There is no real surprise that we talk a great deal about "you" and "software," but is there anything you would like us to write about and cover more in the future?

Remove Background Noise from Audio with WavePad

If you have ever made an audio recording where there are a lot of things going on, like recording an interview at coffee shop, or meetings and lectures with lots of people in the room, you are probably quite familiar with the unwanted background noise that will be a part of your audio when you go back to listen. Sometimes just having a lower quality microphone will add to this background noise, even when you are in relatively quiet surroundings. But the good news is that WavePad audio editor provides an easy way to remove this unwanted noise so you don't need to move all your recording into a studio to get a crisp sounding file.

To remove that unwanted background noise, load your audio file into WavePad.

1. On the Effects tab, click the Cleanup button and select Noise Reduction, Audio Spectral Subtraction. Click the preset drop-menu and select voice or music, then click OK to apply.
2. Then again from the Effects tab, click the Cleanup button and select Noise Reduction, Multi-band noise gating. Select a preset, then click OK to apply.

If the presets aren't giving you the best results, try using lower levels on each type of reduction until you find a combination that leaves you with just the audio that you want to hear. Download WavePad audio editing software today to try the noise reduction feature for yourself.

WavePad at the Radio Studio

Guest post by Daan Berg

There are many local radio stations in the Netherlands, 285 to be exact. I am a volunteer at one of these stations, where I produce and present a live weekly breakfast-with-news show every Saturday morning.

However, sometimes I need to cheat, when I need to be somewhere else during broadcast hours. Therefore, whenever I can't make a live show, I pre-record it and upload the three hours of material to the control room server, which plays the recordings during my broadcast hours as if I were there, talking live and playing music to my listeners.

I do my recording in a small studio booth in the cozy building of the combined radio and television station, in which all the professional equipment -- from audio mixers and microphones to professional recorders -- are installed. I can plug my laptop into an outlet of the mixer and start recording, which usually works fine. But recently, things went wrong.

I had just finished recording three hours of great radio with lots of enthusiasm, which one always needs when hosting any kind of show. I opened up WavePad which I always use for audio editing, to cut off the silences at the beginning and end of the files and listen if everything sounded OK. It didn't. What happened?

It turned out the internal sound processor of the audio mixer, the boards full of sliders and knobs you always see in front of radio producers, had its limiter set to a way too aggressive setting. Limiting is the act of bringing the volume of a device down quickly when it's too loud. For instance, you will notice that if you bring a microphone close to your mouth and shout into it, you will hear that your speakers can't cope. However, radio hosts shout into microphones from time to time. On the radio, it is very rare to hear this, as the limiter in the control room will automatically pull the volume of the microphone down to make sure no gear is damaged and to make the sound more enjoyable.

However, a limiter can also be set too aggressive. Instead of only pulling down peaks that go above a certain maximum level, a limiter can also see every peak as a peak that's too loud. The result: a recording with terribly annoying volume changes every tenth of a second, like someone is heavily abusing the volume knob on a radio.

So I was stuck with three hours of material that I couldn't use. Until I remembered that WavePad has an Automatic Gain Control function, which analyses the volume of the audio file and makes adjustments where needed.

It most certainly worked! Of course, the result wasn't perfect yet -- software can never 100% undo what was done with analog equipment -- but when the edited files were played back through the central server, it sounded fine. This had to do with the fact that the control room also sports a compressor, which is a machine that does the opposite of a limiter; it increases the volume when it's too soft.

Thanks to WavePad Audio Editor, I didn't have to start recording all over again. If I had done it all over with my enthusiasm completely gone it would've sounded terrible.


Daan Berg is a local journalist in the Netherlands. He writes for a national newspaper and hosts a weekly breakfast radio show on local radio. He also makes all kinds of media productions, from radio & television items and shows to websites.

How to Remove Vocals in a Song with WavePad

One of the most popular features of our audio editing software, WavePad, is the ability to reduce or remove the vocals within a song or a piece of audio you have loaded. You can use the resulting file for karaoke, sampling instruments, remixing music tracks, or simply save to have an instrumental only version of a song.

When you have your song loaded in WavePad go to the Effects tab and click the Voice button. Select Reduce vocals from the drop-down menu. This will open a dialog box that will allow you to change the pan position and width, the vocal level, and preserve the bass. Generally the default settings will work the best, but different songs may require different settings to effectively reduce or eliminate the vocal frequencies. If the default settings don't do enough you can adjust these settings until you are satisfied with the result.

If you only want to reduce the vocals on the portion of the audio be sure to select the region first. By default if nothing is selected WavePad will apply the effect to the entire file, so you can skip the selection before choosing reduce vocals to edit the entire song.

Download WavePad music editing software today to try out the vocal reduction feature and make better background music, your own karaoke songs, or use the new version with a recording of your own singing rendition to mix in.

Transcription City Makes Their First Instructional Video

Guest post by Transcription City, specialist transcription services

As most transcriptionists know, NCH Software makes some pretty awesome dictation and transcription software. Most of our transcriptionists use Express Scribe for their transcription work, and it is the programme I always recommend when anyone asks for advice on transcription software because of its simplicity and ease of use with pretty much any audio or video file. At the office, I also use Switch audio file converter from time to time, usually because somebody has sent me a file in an unusual audio or video format. I also use Switch to compress large files, which can save so much time when a transcriptionist needs to download a file for quick turnaround. In my opinion, NCH make some of the best software around, so when we decided to make some instructional videos for our clients, NCH VideoPad was our first choice for video editing.

Watch all the Transcription City videos on YouTube at youtube.com/transcriptioncity

Transcription City is an up-and-coming company, and we want our clients to be able to get to know us as a trusted and professional brand. This is why we came up with the idea of making a few videos to help our clients to get to grips with our website, as well as learn a few tips on recording a high-quality audio or video file. In theory, it was simple: make an informative video and then post it to YouTube. As Company Director, I felt the responsibility should lie on me to introduce potential clients to our company, but the problem was once the camera was pointed at me, I would instantly forget what I was going to say or burst into fits of laughter due to my embarrassment; after all, I�m no Angelina Jolie! We needed a solution so we could cut out the guff and get our point across to our clients clearly and informatively.

Enter VideoPad. After downloading VideoPad from the NCH website (which took us less than a few minutes) we began editing our video. VideoPad was so user friendly that we had a fully edited video in around half an hour, without even watching the tutorials. We were so impressed with the software because we could easily edit and upload video from any camcorder or even an iPhone. VideoPad will accept any video file and it can easily be uploaded to YouTube or transferred to DVD (great if you have made a lot of home movies). You can easily add music or narration, stabilise a shaky video or add photos and captioning to your film.

I can honestly say that by using NCH VideoPad, we have created professional, informative videos that our clients can really benefit from. Now, if we could just get them to arrange George Clooney to star in our next video...

Transcription City offers specialist transcription services to businesses and individuals around the world. They provide a cost effective way of getting work done quickly and faultlessly for large and small companies alike.

Add New Dimension to your VideoPad Projects

Two dimensions got you down? Wishing you could add a little something extra to your videos to make them stand out? In addition to new chroma key options, VideoPad now lets you export your finished movie for stereoscopic 3D viewing, yet another example that big things do come in small packages. Simply select the "Stereoscopic 3D" icon at the far right of the "Save Movie" window and set your options below - it's that easy. You'll have several options for stereoscopic output depending on your preference, although the default anaglyph imagery selection is the often the most effective way to produce a stereoscopic 3D.

While you won�t need a fancy new television to view your eye-popping creations, you will need two things: one is a set of 3D glasses with red and blue lenses and the other is a suitable way to view your content. For desktop viewing, I recommend Steroscopic Player. It�s both free and is well suited to view any 3D content you export out of VideoPad.

For more information about VideoPad or any other of our acclaimed video software products, visit www.nchsoftware.com/software/video.html

MIDI Support Coming to NCH Software

If you�ve ever gone rooting around for MIDI support in the feature lists of NCH Software audio products, you most likely didn�t find it�at the time. But soon you will. A myriad of MIDI features are being added throughout our audio software category.

The most notable example at the moment is in MixPad multi-track mixing software. You can load a MIDI file into MixPad and then double click the clip to edit it. This will launch a MIDI editor dialog that allows you to move notes around, create and delete notes and resize notes on a piano roll. Since a MIDI sequence is really only a set of digital instructions, it�s easier to pinpoint specific notes and alter them than with an audio file:


The current version of MixPad already features this new MIDI editor. In the future, MixPad will have broader MIDI support, such as allowing users to connect a MIDI capable mixing deck to control the program.

MIDI is starting to play a larger role in all our audio software. Plans to implement the following capabilities are in the works:

• Playback of MIDI files as music using built in and external synthesizers
  
• Record MIDI control sequences
  
• Edit MIDI files
  
• Control software (e.g., MixPad mixing software or Zulu dj software) with a MIDI device
  
• Convert MIDI files to audio
  

These features will be included in varying combinations in WavePad audio editor, MixPad multi-track mixer, Zulu virtual dj, Switch audio converter, and MIDIPad�a new full-featured MIDI editor currently in development. We�re excited to see how MIDI will contribute to our audio software. How do you think you�ll use it?

Boost Audio Quality for Radio and Podcast Production

From radio to podcasting, having high quality audio matters. So if you are recording and producing audio content, NCH Software's top audio software duo Wavepad audio editor and Mixpad multitrack recorder and mixer will provide you with the audio tools you need to produce high quality audio to your listeners. Just ask the people behind The Yes Hour Radio Show, a growing radio program that will be increasing their broadcasts in January. As they grow they have been committed to providing the highest quality audio to their listeners, so one of the recent changes they've made was changing their audio editing software and coming to NCH:

"The first thing we've done, which you might have noticed, is to change our editing software. We initially started by using magic studio, which served its purpose for a small production, but as things grew, that is, as we began to develop our content for The Yes Hour and invited guests on the show we decided to try another program called Mixpad and it's editing component Wavepad... These two NCH Software applications have enabled us to do so much, including recording on a multi-track bed, editing telephone interviews, importing new music from local and existing artists."

� Serious Voice of New York, The Yes Hour Radio Show

If you are producing your own radio show, or any other audio project, we hope you too will check out the full range of audio software and software for radio stations we provide to help make you sound your best.