Editing Sound Files

[Jamie]

I am looking for some recommendations for programs that can edit sounds files, specifcally mp3's. The main thing I need to be able to do is cut a section of the sound out of the middle while leaving the start and the end parts.

Preferably free but I am willing to pay a little.

[Marble]

Audacity... cool and simple audio editor that I have used a number of times...

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

You will probably also need to get Lame mp3 encoder as well..

http://lame.sourceforge.net/

[Jamie]

Thanks Marble. Downloading now.

[the_pm]

I prefer Blade or Fraunhofer to Lame for Mp3 encoding. I believe both are available free. But test them all and decide what works best for your ears.

If you can't find software you like, I use Sound Forge for editing and encoding. You can ship the mp3 over to me and I'll edit it for you.

[Jamie]

Thanks Paul. I will have a play over the next day or so and if all else fails I'll be sending an mp3 your way.

[Jamie]

Audacity is very good indeed. It is doing just what I wanted and producing some brilliant results. :)

[Jamie]

Marble, I have one beat in the song that I am trying to get rid of, due to the song playing too fast though I cannot tell exactly where this beat is. Is there a way to slow it down or manually scroll through the sound as you can in flash?

[Christina]

I would recommend Soundforge, Peak, or Pro Tools.

[Marble]

But those are costly, unless you get the ProTools LE, which is crap imo... but for simplicity, Audacity is a pretty intuative and easy program... I've spent many hours editing audio (Mastering and editing for post) and have used lots of different programs (Soundforge, Cubase, Peak, Pro Tools, TripleDat, Cakewalk, etc...) and for what he needs those are overkill... except Peak, which is a pretty simple cutter. As far as mp3 encoding I have always used Lame or the built in ones, but I should check out those others... never spent much time searching mp3 encoding... OGG is better anyways =D

As far as finding the beat its hard to tell without actually hearing the part, but usually I look for peaks - mostly in snare hits to tell where the pattern is.. but if you are editing a crazy D&B part might be a bit tricky =D ..

When you edit out a chunk of a song the schoolbook method tells you to find the lowest point and snap there, but I usually had better results finding a peak (snare again) and snapping them together there, put a few milliseconds fade in/out to smooth between the 2 samples... might be automatic with this, but you might have to manually do it.

[Christina]

For simple cuts I like SoundForge........I usually blow it up to see the peaks which is helpful. Also, if you do this quite often you'll soon have well trained ears for sound editing. If the sound though is going to be looping, I prefer a hard straight cut on the precise beats that will loop and overlap but that's just me ;)

[Jamie]

Thanks guys. I have decided to import the sound in to a flash movie then use flash to manually scroll through the movie, in theory I should then be able to see exactly where the blip is.

[Marble]

Good deal... one other thing I remembered is you can highlight a section and loop it. Keep moving it until you get the right spot...

[Jamie]

This is driving me crazy at the moment, I just don't have the sight and ear coordination to find the right spot.

[Jamie]

I may be wrong but it may be missing a whole darned note. :lol:

Ok, time to start all over again because it seems I have deleted a whole note or even two.

[Jamie]

Restarted it and finally got what I want, bar a few lyrics. You can't listen though, it's secret. ;)

[websterworld]

Restarted it and finally got what I want, bar a few lyrics. You can't listen though, it's secret. ;)

Oh come on! :P (are you going to ever post it?)

[Jamie]

:lol: Time will tell Eugene.