I’m trying to do some simple editing of audio files like .wav or .mp3. I don’t need anything fancy. All I’m really trying to learn right now is cutting the audio at a certain point, putting some dead air in front of the track so it has a second or two of silence before starting, and doing a fade out at the end or fade in at the beginning. What’s an easy, free program I can download for that?
Audacityis really good - free and highly functional.
Audacity. I’m sure other posters will be along presently to second this. It’s free, easy to use, and does everything you’re looking for it to do and more.
Yup, Audacity.
Audacity. Audacity. Audacity.
EchoEchoEcho
I like Goldwave, personally.
The evaluation version of GoldWave is free, but expires after a certain number of uses. You will then be required to purchase it if you want to keep using it indefinitely. Audacity is completely free from the day you install it and will never expire.
Threads asking for opinions or suggestions go in IMHO.
Moved from General Qjuestions.
samclem, Moderator
A wrinkle with Audacity: if you want to make MP3s, you may need to install another separate piece of software called “the LAME encoder”. This is apparently due to licensing issues. You only have to do this once though.
Another bit about Audacity, musician and producer Todd Rundgren used Audacity to create his album Arena. When he started work on the album, he fired up his ProTools rig and it wouldn’t work. Rather than hassle with getting the finicky hardware back up and running, he figured out how to produce the whole album on his Macbook.
If it’s good enough for the guy who produced the 5th best selling album of all time, it is probably good enough for YogSosoth.
Ah. I think I have an old enough version that it doesn’t do that.
Audacity is very good, but I would never call it “easy to use”.
I guess you’re right, but only in the sense that editing and mixing of audio files using a computer is never going to be utterly simple, at the same time as being full-featured and completely within the creative control of the user.
That is, the process can be dumbed down, but this will probably come at the cost of losing fine creative control.
I do like Audacity, and think it’s a whole lot easier than the big-time software to just cut up some tracks or record something. Actually, fading, inserting silence, all that is pretty darn easy in Audacity – or, I don’t know of an easier program. Maybe a gentle learning curve, but up and running PDQ, I’d say, for the OP’s needs.
I did want to give one caution, since I see mp3 noted in OP – you really want to be careful about editing mp3s and then saving them back (i.e., recompressing) as mp3s. The kind of degradation you get is pretty bad. I’d just leave them as WAVs (or whatever lossless format), but you’ll find out soon enough what quality you can deal with. (FWIW wavs or whatever are fine, edit and save them all day).
Ok so people are saying that Audacity is not all that easy to use. I realize it’s free, and that puts it ahead of Goldwave, which I recommended. However I must say that Goldwave is VERY easy to use. I know nothing about audio and I’m able to do a lot with it. The pricing is $49 for a full lifetime license or $19 for a one-year license. Like I said, mine is so old I think I got grandfathered in to a free or really cheap price, but those prices aren’t that high (obviously depends on your budget, but they could be a lot higher!)
I’m not trying to pressure anyone into going with Goldwave, just saying that for this audio-novice it’s pretty easy to use and it isn’t all that expensive. So it’s still something to consider, in any case.
Goldwave doesn’t look conceptually very different from Audacity - the audio tracks are visualised as oscilloscope-style waves that you can select parts of. There are buttons for playback and editing, and menu options for applying effects etc.
Having never used Audacity, I can’t say how similar they are or ease of use compared to each other. All I can give is my own experience, which is that as someone who knows very little about audio editing, I’ve been able to do quite a lot with Goldwave without much difficulty. It could easily be that I could have done just as well with Audacity–I just don’t know. Just providing a data point.
Professional narrator here… I use Audacity (currently the 1.3.12 beta version). I own Sound Forge, but it is waaay too complicated for single track voice recording and editing. Audacity does everything I need it to do. Copy, paste, insert silence, label tracks within a single file, export multiple files (in any format, with LAME for MP3), import multiple formats of audio, set imput levels, normalize, set up hot-keys for editing ergonomics and speed…
Unless you are looking to do full studio multi-track recording with a band, go with Audacity. Free, good support group (forum), open source, so they take suggestions for future releases… you can’t go wrong.
I love Audacity for the simple projects, such as mentioned in the OP, but I have tried to download the LAME encoder of wonder, and I’ll be hanged if I even know if it’s on my computer, let alone being able to make it function. I have allegedly downloaded it at least twice, and did whatever I could find to do, but, in the end, I have had to use, uh, well, I forget the name right now, but it was free from Download.com, and has a lightning bolt for its icon, to convert to mp3.
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No problem - I wasn’t trying to shoot down your recommendation - only wanted to say that the complexity in use of any competent solution is probably more to do with the inherent features of the task at hand, rather than the software itself.