Burn baby burn
Trevor Eddolls shows us how to make your own client CD on a PC
T
he ?rst things you need, as they say in
all the best recipe books, are a blank
CD, a reasonable microphone, relaxing
background music, and decent software.
There is some great software available, at a
price, such as Adobe Audition, but the best
freeware for recording, editing, and double
tracking is Audacity. You’ll be able to ?nd it
on Google and download and install it. The
second piece of free software you’ll need
will convert sound ?les from wma (a ?le
extension for Windows Media Audio ?les)
to mp3 (Moving Picture Experts Group 3).
No-one cares what these acronyms mean;
you just want Earth.wma to become Earth.
mp3, so you can use it.
The next step is to get the background
hypnotic music that you want playing. If
you’ve got a CD from the Clifton Practice
it’s probably a single track called Earth
(You can ?nd many other tracks on the
web, but make sure they are copyright free
and you have permission to use them).
You need to rip this Earth track o? the CD
and onto your computer. You can do this
using Windows Media Player (which came
free with your computer). Insert the CD
and select Rip from the menu; it’s one long
track (about an hour). Make sure you know
where the ripped ?le is saved, usually “My
Music” or Music. If you don’t have a copy of
Earth on a CD you can get relaxation music
from various sources. Don’t use anything
that you don’t have copyright to or that isn’t
freely available for other people to use.
Now you need to convert your wma ?le
(from ripping the CD) into an mp3. If you
got the track from elsewhere, you may not
need this stage. You can use Switch for
Windows or Smart Audio Converter (or
anything else you ?nd searching Google).
When you’ve done that, you can start to
record you speaking.
12 Hypnotherapy Today
So, launch Audacity. Click the big red
record button in the tool bar to record your
audio track. Hint: wait 10 seconds before
speaking. Just keep talking. Every time you
fumble a word or get the phrasing of the
sentence wrong, simply say it again correctly.
Your 25 minute CD can take closer to an
hour to record. When you get to the end,
wait about
10 seconds
and
then
click on the
stop button;
it’s the yellow
square.
Save your
?le
now!
( A c t u a l l y,
you select
Export As
M P 3 … )
Give it a
sensible
name and note where you are saving to.
You may ?nd your recording is a little
quiet. You can increase the volume by
clicking anywhere on the recording, and
typing Ctrl and a at the same time; this
selects the whole ?le. Then from the menu
select E?ect and from the drop-down box
Amplify... A new box will appear and you
can put in a value – 5dB or perhaps 10dB.
This will make the peaks of the waves look
higher and the volume will be louder. You
can repeat the process and use a minus
value to make the volume less. A graph will
indicate the work going on. If you make a
mistake you always have Undo (Ctrl and z
or choose Undo from the Edit menu).
The next
stage is to
edit out all
the verbal
stumbles.
Au d a c i t y
works like Word and other PC software
in that you can select and cut (Ctrl and x)
bits that you don’t want. Use headphones
or go to a quiet room and concentrate on
listening to your recording and then you
can edit out any bits that shouldn’t be there.
You can zoom in
on the track using
the lens tool. That
makes it easier to
see where the sound
of words start and
ends. Select the bits
of sound wave you
don’t want by using
the text tool and
clicking at the start
and shift clicking at
the end. Use Ctrl and x to cut out the wrong
words. Always double check you have got
the right part and not too much. If you’ve
made a mistake, Ctrl and x will undo the