Another great blog Joanne. Lot's of good information and with your conversational style of writing, everything is easy to understand.

A few comments about Audacity. A shortcut to silence up to the intro is to select that area and hit ctrl-L keys. Very fast. At that point I may move the cursor to the edge of the selected area and the cursor will change to a pointed finger and I just drag the selection back to the point I want to delete the leading silence.

You may want to experiment with the method I use to normalize audio in Audacity. I select the entire track and select the compressor and lightly compress the entire track. I use the default settings for 1:5 compression. After compressing the stereo track, while the entire track is still selected, I select normalize and normalize the track. This results in normalizing the peaks down rather than upward. This appears to raise the overall volume more cleanly due to the compression lowering the peaks so the volume can be raised without raising the track noise floor...

Also, according to how a song begins, I sometimes select and use the fade in option to ease an abrupt beginning of a song. I do this before I delete the silence so I can experiment and choose the best fade in volume.

Audacity has some pretty nice plug ins and is quite a useful program.

Charlie

BIAB 2025:RB 2025, Latest builds: Dell Optiplex 7040 Desktop; Windows-10-64 bit, Intel Core i7-6700 3.4GHz CPU and 16 GB Ram Memory.