You should always click the record button and start recording in Audacity before you place the needle on the record. If you place the needle on the record first and then rush to set Audacity to start recording before the music starts playing, you will be hurried and you will probably miss the first part of the music anyway. Remember that any extraneous noise, such as the needle being placed onto the record or other false starts, can easily be edited out of Audacity afterwards.
After recording one whole side of the record, I always stop Audacity. Some people may prefer to just click the pause button in Audacity, flip the record over, and start recording again into one long file. However, since the various songs on the record are going to be split into separate tracks on the digitized file anyway, it is just as easy to do one side at a time.
When recording, an important interface element of Audacity to pay attention to is the left and right input meters. They will "dance" or fill-in according to the loudness of the music. They should both be showing an equally strong signal. If they don't, there is something either wrong with your record player, your cord, your sound input settings on your computer, or the setting of the balance knob on the record player.
Avoid recording at too loud a level, or "clipping."
The left and right input meters show up as green when they are getting a good, strong signal. They should be filling up almost all the way during loud passages to ensure a good strong signal. However, they should not be veering into the "red zone." This means that your record player is set too loud, causing "clipping," or loud notes exceeding the range of the recorder, and it could cause distortion in the finished recording. It is better to make the recording slightly too soft than too loud; you can always set the song's default playback level in iTunes later anyway.
When the song is recording, you will see the "wavy line" in Audacity dancing in time to the music. When the song is over and you press Audacity's stop button, Audacity will generate the waveform, or the visual representation of the music. The waveform is where you make edits.
You can use the magnifying glass tool in Audacity to zoom in onto one portion of the waveform to make precise selections, such as to delete empty space at the beginning or end of the album.
To select part of the waveform, drag the I-beam tool over the part of the waveform you want to work with, much as you would drag the cursor over a line of text to delete some words. Release the mouse button after you have dragged to the desired spot and that part of the waveform will be highlighted.
If you did not highlight the right area, you may click anywhere in the waveform to deselect and then try over again. When you are satisfied, press the delete key on your keyboard and the undesired part of the recording will be deleted.
Audacity has a filter which tries to remove the pops and clicks that are an inevitable byproduct of vinyl, but in all honesty, it doesn't work very well. It's very hard for any filter to remove such noise without removing some of the presence of a sound as well. My advice is to not try to remove the pops and clicks; just considered it part of the "warmth" and "richness" of vinyl!
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