In this section, you will look for an openly-licensed music track, suitable for an introduction to a voice recording, and practise how to fade in and fade out the track using Audacity.

Where to find openly licensed music

As you know, most music will be copyrighted as ‘all rights reserved’. This means you cannot copy an audio track of your favorite musician(s) to include in a teaching resource. Therefore, you need to find music with an open copyright license. There are several websites of music with Creative Commons licences, which you can download and re-mix when making teaching resources. Here, we provide a few options:

• The Free Music Archive (FMA) – Check that you are searching the Creative Commons collection of music on the FMA website. If you can’t see a Creative Commons search filter, you are on the wrong section of the site.
• digCCmixter is a website operated by ArtisTech Media, which hosts music with Creative Commons licences. Many tracks are licensed with the Non-Comercial (NC) restriction, which you need to consider when licensing your re-mixed work. If you would like to use tracks with more flexible licences, use the filter ‘free for commercial use’ when you are searching.
• Freesound is a collaborative database of Creative Commons Licensed sounds, and is a good source for sound effects. Remember to click on the appropriate link under the ‘licences filter’ section on the ‘search list’ page.

Fade in and fade out using Audacity

Screencast - Fading a music track

Watch this short video by Amanda Holender, which shows you how to fade-in and fade-out a music track using Audacity. This will help you prepare for the mini-challenge in this section

Mini-challenge

Find a music track and edit it in Audacity for your introduction clip

Purpose: Find a suitable, openly-licensed music track, and fade-in and fade-out the volume using Audacity, to include as an ‘intro’ track in your audiographic project

1. Visit a free music repository (see list above) and search for an openly-licensed music track to include in your audiographic project
   • Remember to note the title, author, source URL, and licence, so that you can correctly attribute these in your final project
2. Open Audacity, and import the file by clicking on: File –> Import –> Audio
3. Complete the editing tasks:
   • Reduce the length of the audio track to between 8 and 10 seconds maximum
   • Fade-in the volume over about 1 and a half seconds
   • Fade-out the volume over 2 to 3 seconds
4. Save this as an Audacity project (.AUP file), so you can edit it later if you need to
5. Export the project as an audio file (for example, .MP3, .WAV, or .OGG (an open source audio file format)) to use later in your audiographic project