Chopping up music files

[GStan]

I'm fairly computer illiterate and have a question that hopefully someone here can answer. I put on a golf trip every year with a bunch of friends and every year we like to add a little flare to improve it from the previous year. This year, I was thinking of announcing player names on the first tee and playing short segments of "theme songs" for each player, maybe five or ten second clips. My question is, is there some kind of user-friendly free or open source software available for editing audio files in this manner. What I want to do is isolate the small segment of the song file that I am interested in and delete the rest of it, then put all the segments onto a CD or iPod that we can play when we announce the participants. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

GStan

[Guybrush Threepwood]

I'm sure ubergeeks will be along shortly to swamp you with better advice, but Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) works for me.

[alfaniner]

Do you have a iMac and Garageband? You could use the same process as for making Ringtones.

[logical muse]

I give a vote to the open source Audacity as well.

[GreNME]

Do you have a iMac and Garageband? You could use the same process as for making Ringtones.

If you have a PC, grabbing the program Sound Forge (sold by Sony, originally created by Sonic Foundry) is pretty much the best consumer-level retail apps for cutting up sound files.

[GeeMack]

[...] Any advice would be greatly appreciated.


Yes, Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/). It's robust, full featured, versatile, and the price is right. (Gotta love Open Source!) The learning curve might seem intimidating if you've never used such software before, but don't let it throw you. Editing music clips is actually a lot like copying, cutting, and pasting text in a word processor.

There are several other very good (and sometimes very costly) software options, too. Adobe makes one called Audition. Roland makes a few levels of their Cakewalk product, the entry level being (I believe) Music Creator. Some of these might be available at your closest big name electronics store (Best Buy, Guitar Center, etc.) starting at maybe $40 and ranging into hundreds of dollars and up. If you buy something, stay simple and cheap. They'll all do what you want.

Here's some advice that might help after you get the music clips edited down the way you want them. Make a very long silent track (using Audacity or whatever software you end up using for your editing), maybe a half hour long. Save it in a very low resolution, highly compressed, mono, so the file size is as small as possible. Then when you create your CD (or your playlist on your iPod, Sansa Clip, etc.), put a copy of that silent track between every audio track.

Why? Because it allows you to cue through the music clips with much less fumbling. When you press the >> to advance to each next track in your cue, that clip will play, and when it's done the player will just move on to play the silent track. You don't have to pause the player between clips. That silent track will just be there playing a whole lot of nothing until you hit the >> button again to advance to the next audio clip.

That's how we run audio cues for magicians and other solo entertainers and small acts. It works great if you have several music/sound cues in a prescribed order, but with varying times between cues. Just make that one silent audio track way longer than your longest anticipated time between cues. I have an hour long silent MP3 that only takes up about 3.5 megs. I've never needed anything longer than that.

Oh, and even if you figure to play them with something like an iPod, you should probably save all your music clips as WAV files instead of MP3 files. You'll likely start with MP3 compressed files as your sources. No reason to compress the results again and lose even more fidelity. Almost every iPod-type device will happily play WAVs, and for your purpose there's no reason to try to skimp on the space you use on the device. Use the best quality music you can make. You can put hours and hours of full resolution WAV files on a even a little bitty 2 gigabyte digital audio player.

[politas]

Since you asked for free or open-source, Audacity is the best answer. It's very good, and works on any operating system.

[ChrisC]

Audacity will do the job.

However, I think you're overlooking a significant hurdle: Golf = !flare. :D
Maybe I'm just sore because I'm possibly almost certainly the worst golfer on earth. Seriously, have fun.

[GStan]

Thank you much for all of the recommendations.

GeeMack - great tip on the silent tracks.

I will have some time to try Audacity this weekend.

ChrisC - a subscription to Golf Digest was the best thing I ever did for my bad golf game. ;)