Thread: I Need Help With Audio Editing

Congrats on getting married, I have no idea on audio editing tho.

Software

Thanks V! I'll give it a shot this afternoon when I get home.

I smell a disaster, considering my lack of experience but WTF it's only my wedding day.

What have you got to edit with?

Wavelab, Soundforge, Logic etc.?

Record the song as a Wav. mp3, aac, etc. file (compatible with your editor), or just rip it from cd, and save as desired format.

Load the file into the audio editor so you get the waveform display. Find the 1st beat, or the start ot the loop and zoom right in so the waveform is visable as a single line. Where this crosses the zero line, mark, or just click on. zoom back (leaving the cursor on the 1st beat) out and play through to the end of the bar, e.g where you want to loop to end. Zoom in to this, and find where it crosses the zero line (as like before). This point will generally be just before the next beat kicks in, typically a bass drum hit.

Now you have the boundaries of your loop marked. If you were to play this loop it would now loop over and over, e.g if it was a 1 bar drum loop it would play over and over perfectly in time.
So now you can either drag the cursor over the wave, from mark in to mark out of the loop, right click>cut and open a new wave window and paste, or just delete everything out with the loop in the original window.
Once the loop is cut, either keep pasting it on the back of the original loop, for as many times as required to have for example a 3minute song consisting on the same loop playing over and over.
Or
Enter it into a audio sequencer, synch the bpm and insert the loop back to back on 1 of the audio tracks right through. This is better for adding effects and fades etc.

Hope that helps, could have been more clear, but my head's not working well due to an evil hangover.

The audio editor Viope pointed out should work grand.

Here's some more:
http://www.harmony-central.com/Softw...o_editing.html

Audacity is a way cut down version of Soundfoge, so these notes might help:
http://www.rice.edu/fondren/dmc/howto/forge/index.html

Thanks goob! This doesn't make much sense to me right now because I'm not playing with it but I'm sure it will help a ton when I get home and start messing around.

One question? Will I need to purchase an audio sequencer program or are these open source programs that are listed good enough?

Originally Posted by largepkg

Thanks goob! This doesn't make much sense to me right now because I'm not playing with it but I'm sure it will help a ton when I get home and start messing around.

One question? Will I need to purchase an audio sequencer program or are these open source programs that are listed good enough?

For what you need it for, the open source programs should be more than enough, some are easier than others to use. Tractor (based) sequencers are easy to use and will do the trick. The only thing about open source is that good ones that have'nt been save disabled or slightly handicapped demo versions are not too easy to find, but they are out there.
Its one of these things that are best learned by screwing around with them, i'm sure you'll get the hang of it.

Congrats on getting ready to be married.

Get GoldWave. It's very powerful and easy to use.

OK, I have another question guys. Is there a way to remove just the vocals from the song? This song is proving very difficult for me to find the right loop point and it would would be easy if I could just remove the vocals.


Thanks DOMS! I'm using the Goldware and it's great so far but still a difficult song.

Originally Posted by largepkg

OK, I have another question guys. Is there a way to remove just the vocals from the song? This song is proving very difficult for me to find the right loop point and it would would be easy if I could just remove the vocals.


Thanks DOMS! I'm using the Goldware and it's great so far but still a difficult song.

You're welcome!

As for removing the vocals, I'm no audio engineer, but I don't think that it's really feasible. Some recording media has the audio in its own channel, but if you're dealing with MP3s (or similar lossy format), it's probably not going to happen. The reason is that some of the music will be at the same frequency as the vocals. So if you do a pass filter to remove the vocals, you'll lose some of the music as well.

Take this with a grain of salt. Like I said, I'm not an audio engineer. I just learn things as I come across them. It's not like I studied it.

Having said all that, you can try this.

Originally Posted by DOMS

You're welcome!

As for removing the vocals, I'm no audio engineer, but I don't think that it's really feasible. Some recording media has the audio in its own channel, but if you're dealing with MP3s (or similar lossy format), it's probably not going to happen. The reason is that some of the music will be at the same frequency as the vocals. So if you do a pass filter to remove the vocals, you'll lose some of the music as well.

Take this with a grain of salt. Like I said, I'm not an audio engineer. I just learn things as I come across them. It's not like I studied it.

Having said all that, you can try this.

Bang on. Even specific very high end hardware and software cannot perform vocal removal on some tracks. As said, it's down to the mixdown and frequency. It's very unlikely a pass or graphical notch filter could take out the vocals, and even if they did you would lose some of the mid range frequency. However, with very careful, and multi-stage frequency equilisation you can get the track to sound better, but this is track specific, e.g the more processed and 'busy' the original is, the less chance of geting a good result.
Even the 'cancelling' technique for subtracting and inverting the left channel (as Doms stated-usually tends to be the one the vocals are biased mixed too) can only be succesful on certain tracks. Believe me, i've tried numerous techniques to perform vocal removal, without much success.
Best thing to do is to experiment, to see if you can pull something out of the bag.