But there’s a slight twist. Even a divvy such as I knows how to burn a DVD from my iTunes play list; what I want to do is more of an audio collage of sorts. Just 30 seconds or so snippets of a bunch of different things - think of a video montage without the video bit.
If it helps to understand what I’m getting at, it’s for an old friend’s birthday and I want to put together a DVD with the songs of our childhood. A very few of them I do own, but I don’t particularly want to purchase 20 or so songs that I will never listen to again. So, is there an alternative? Say I obtain all the materials, how then do I record small portions and then how do I make them run smoothly together? I fear the answer to this is either embarrassingly obvious or way over my head. Either way, I’d be, as always, ever so grateful if any of you smart cookies could advise. Thanks in advance.
Audacity is a free audio file editor. If you have source material (either CDs or MP3s), you should be able to use Audacity to record snippets of each song and then stitch the snippets together with nice cross-fades. Once you’ve generated one big-ass WAV file, you can use something like LAME to convert it to an MP3 file.
Some time ago I found music on a YouTube video for which I could not possibly have found the source material. The problem was that Audacity somehow could not record the audio coming from the YouTube video. Don’t know if this was just something goofy with my settings, but my solution was to play the YouTube video on a laptop, and connect the laptop’s headphone jack to the desktop’s line-in, with Audacity running/recording on the desktop. Worked perfectly. You can probably find whatever song you’re looking for for free on YouTube, and then record the snippets that way.
Thanks. I was thinking I could use YouTube in some way. I do know how to embed a video in a presentation and then edit it so I was thinking I could maybe somehow incorporate that process but it seems very convoluted.
It’s possible to download a YouTube video, and then extract the audio, but the way you did it is probably easier. There are also utilities that will capture the audio being played, so you don’t have to use any cables.
Google “youtube to mp3” and you’ll find lots of sites that will automatically extract audio from videos.
They do work well, but I wanted to note that you need to be careful on many of those sites. The price you pay for free YouTube to MP3 conversion is a minefield of ads, many of which look like legitimate interface elements.
There are non-spammy Firefox extensions to download YouTube videos, and VLC Media Player can extract the audio.
If you just download the video, Audacity can extract the audio, but you have to open the video file from inside Audacity.
I’ve been using youtube-dl for years. There’s an option to download just the audio.