How to record audio in Windows

These instructions are how to record audio to mp3 fairly easily, using Free tools. You need two programs, and audio recorder (Audacity is what I have used), and an mp3 encoder (LAME is my choice here).

To get Audacity, go to here and grab the audacity-win.exe Installer (or just save the files pointed to by this link. Run the .exe, follow the installation prompts, and it should be ready to use.

LAME, the mp3 encoder, should be installed before you do your first recorder, so you can export it to MP3 format. You can get LAME from here, or if you prefer, here is a direct link to the Zip file (lame-3.96.1.zip). You need to download the Zip file, and extract it's contents somewhere. I suggest making a directory like "C:\Program Files\Lame\", and extracting everything into there. Remember this location, as Audacity will ask for it when we first try to export to mp3.

So, now we have recording software, and a way to convert the audio into a format suitable for the internet. Next up is actually recording the audio. Make sure you have a microphone attached to the computer, and in working order. Launch Audacity, it should open on a kinda-sorta-almost confusing window. There should be a row of six big buttons near the top, these are what are used to control recording. The big red circle is record, the yellow square is stop. Hit the red circle to start your recording, hit the yellow square when you are done. You can use the green triangle to playback your recording. Once you start recording, a little window will appear showing the wave form as it is recorded. Once the recording is done, if you don't like results, you can close a file just by clicking the little X in the corner of that window.

After you have a good recording, you can export the file to an MP3, for sending to me. Go to the File menu, and select the entry "Export as MP3". Select a location/filename to save your file to, and press the "Save" button. After doing that, you will be asked if you want to locate "lame_enc.dll", answer Yes, and navigate to where you installed LAME, select lame_enc.dll, and press "Open". Next, you will be asked for ID3 tag information. This is optional, but if someone is playing your file, they will be able to see this information. Enter any information you want, press "OK". Your MP3 file should now be generated.

Audacity has most of the basic tools needed to audio editing, you can use it to normalize the volume (increasing it to the maximum volume without clipping), clip out leading/trailing silence, and remove noise. All of this is well beyond the scope of this document, so read the documentation that comes with Audacity, or just play around with it.