CREATE A MIXTAPE ON YOUR USB STICK
Add music and your own voice!
Most music may have gone digital these days, but that doesn’t mean you can no longer create mixtapes as gifts for friends and family (or to keep yourself). Audacity (see page 9) lets you create a digital mixtape by combining a selection of tracks into a single MP3 file. You can then give it a personal touch by recording your own Dj-style intro for each song. We’ll also explain how to create a batch file that plays your mixtape directly from a USB stick, complete with full-screen animated visuals.
Download Audacity from www.audacityteam.org, then
STEP 1 run it. Now open File Explorer (press the Windows key+e), locate the first MP3 to go on your mixtape, then drag it into the Audacity window. This file will now appear as a new track. Repeat this process, dragging the rest of your MP3S over in the order you want them to play. You’ll see they are added as separate tracks 1 , meaning if you press Play, all tracks will play at the same time. To get the tracks to play in sequence, select all of them by pressing Ctrl+a, open the Tracks menu, select Align Tracks, then ‘Align End to End’ 2 .
STEP Although your songs will now play in order, they’ll still be 2 displayed as separate tracks within the Audacity window 1 . To merge them into a single track, click File, Export, ‘Export as MP3’ 2 , give your mixtape a name, then click Yes when asked whether you want the tracks to be ‘mixed down’ (this means all the tracks will be merged into one). Next, click File, Recent Files and load the MP3 file you just saved (you’ll find this at the top of the list). Your songs will now appear as a single track.
STEP You can now add your own
3 spoken intros to each song (skip to Step 5 if you want to include only music). First, connect headphones to your computer so you can hear your music without it being picked up when recording your intros. To record the intro for the first song, hold down the Shift key, then click Record (red-dot button). Your intro will be saved to a new track called Audio Track 1 . Click ‘Stop’ when you’ve finished, then click the section of the track where you want to record the second intro and press Record (don’t hold down Shift this time). Repeat this until you’ve recorded all your intros 2 .
STEP Now you’ve added your intros, you need to reduce the 4 volume of the music in those moments when you’re speaking. Click ‘Select’ at the bottom-left corner of your music track 1 , then open the Edit menu and select Auto Duck. We find that setting the Duck to -10db 2 and the fades to 0.75s 3 works best. Click OK when you’ve finished, then press Play to see how it sounds. If you want to tweak it, press Ctrl+z to undo the changes, then run the Auto Duck effect again with different settings.
STEP Press Ctrl+a to select all tracks, then open the Effect 5 menu 1 , select ‘Normalize…’ and click OK. This tells Audacity to analyze the music (and your intros), then adjust the volume so that it’s more uniform – useful if some of your songs are louder than others. Your mixtape will also still have the metadata (track title, artist name and so on) of the last song you added. It’s best to remove this, otherwise your entire mixtape will use this metadata. Click ‘Edit’ 2 , ‘Metadata…’, Clear 3 , then OK.
STEP Export your MP3 file as before (click File, then 6
Export), but this time saving it to the root directory of your USB stick – in our case, E:\. To play the mixtape on the USB stick, we’re going to use the portable version of VLC. Go to www.snipca. com/38908, then click the down arrow next to ‘Download VLC’ 1 and select ‘Zip package’ 2 ). Once downloaded, open the ZIP file, click ‘Extract all’ 3 , Browse 4 , then select your USB stick and click Extract. A new File Explorer window will open once VLC has been installed to your USB stick.
STEP To create the batch file for your 7 mixtape, open Notepad (search for it in the Start menu), then type start vlc-3.0.16\vlc.exe mixtape. mp3 --audio-visual=visual --effectlist=spectrometer --fullscreen 1 (or copy it from our Pastebin account at www.snipca.com/38909) – changing mixtape.mp3 to match your MP3’S file name. If the version of VLC on your USB stick 2 is named differently to ours, you’ll also need to change the ‘vlc3.0.16’ part of the batch file accordingly. Finally, press Ctrl+s, call the file Mixtape.bat, then save it to your USB stick’s root directory. When you run this file, your USB mixtape will start playing with a full-screen visualisation in VLC.