Friday, November 17, 2006
Audacity
There might be a lot of audio editing software out there, I don’t know. But the one I use has three things that I love: It’s simple, compact and free. You can use it to edit WMV and MP3 files. I use it to create the ringtones I shared last week. Or was that two weeks ago? Um, yeah. Sometime in the past. I also use it to fix MP3s that have annoying things at the beginning or end that ruin the whole listening experience. Like maybe it starts another song before cutting off suddenly, or maybe there’s too much talking going on. You can remove that stuff with a program called Audacity.
There are a few quirks of course. When you save it, it’s in some proprietary Audacity format (I think). You have to use the Export feature to save it into MP3 format. But considering what I can do with it, I can forgive.
The two features I use most are the fader and deleting parts of the track. After loading the audio track into Audacity, you can use your mouse to highlight portions of the track and hit the Delete key to remove them. You can also select a portion of the track, usually the end piece, and have it fade out nicely instead of ending abruptly. Makes for a much more pleasant track to listen to.
I currently am still using the 1.0 version (download it from my server if you’d like), but there are newer version available on their website.
And just to keep with my own personal (even if it is lame) tradition of offering music, here’s one of of my personal favorites. It’s one of the first tracks to enter my collection when I first discovered the world of MP3s. It’s from the soundtrack of The Matrix.
Rob D - Clubbed to Death (Kurayamino Mix)
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Categories: • Music to my ears • Random acts of geekery