If you want to record your first graders journal entries, however, you won�t want all the students� recordings to play at the same time. That is helpful if you teach music, for example, and want to record one student playing guitar, while another plays drums, and a third plays keyboard, and then play all three tracks simultaneously. Both tracks then will play at the same time. If, while recording, you click the yellow square to stop recording and then begin recording again, you�ll create a new audio track. Notice that when you record, an �audio track� appears. If THAT happens, work out what the sound is and kill that sound before doing a retake.Education World® Techtorial: Record it with Audacity A TECHTORIAL Please, do any testing on COPIES of the soundfile, NOT on the original! Audacity will DEFINITELY make the sound louder - but it's got a habit of making background sounds louder you mightn't even have known were there. Each sound has its own buff box, so you can manipulate them separately. Or there's a gain slider in Audacity on the left-hand side of the buff box which the oscilloscope-like sounds are in. MP3 format - if not, convert them to one of those formats or play them as best you can and use Audacity itself to record them - and then use the Amplify function in Audacity to make them as loud as you want. Audacity is a good freeware sound manipulator. If you've done all that and it's still too quiet - it's Audacity time. This is why pop singers are recorded in soundproofed rooms (which have the added side benefit of preventing us from listening to them BEFORE they've been Vocaloided!)
Murmurs coming in from outside (might be quiet to you but could still be masking some of the sounds from hitting the mike.) Anything else along those lines. Computer fans (they're the devil if you're anywhere near them). Just because you're hearing the main sound loudly and the mike's close to it doesn't mean that, to the mike, there aren't other sounds blocking the signal. You have to make sure there's NO other background sounds going on - they might sound faint and immaterial to you but their lower/higher wavelengths could be close enough to those of your voice to be cancelling part of your voice out! The same goes if you're recording any other sounds with an external mike. I don't know if you're entering sound via a microphone or if the sounds you want are on the computer already, but if you're using a microphone - they're dodgy things. If it's still no better, check the recording software you're using (Hypercam) and make sure that all of its sound controls are on full (I've never used Hypercam in my life but it might well have its own sound controls.) They're supposed to talk to eachother, sometimes they have a lover's tiff.
Then check up everything's on full in your generic controls - the ones that came with the soundcard driver - there should be an icon for those in Control Panel. That's the legacy Windows volume controls, not the generic ones that come with the soundcard driver. Go to START/All Programs/Accessories/Entertainment/Volume Control. Don't know if you're using a PC, or Mac, or which version of operating system, so I'll pretend it's a PC.