How to Edit Your Recorded Music Into an Album CD

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So you've followed all the instructions in "How to Digitally Record your Live Music Performance with Portable Equipment", and you want to turn it into a CD album to share with your friends and fellow musicians. Well, you'll be the talk of your music circles, and you can even do it with free open-source sound-editing software.

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Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

Things You’ll Need:

a computer with enough hard drive space to complete the job, approximately a gigabyte
Windows XP or better, Mac OS, or Linux/Unix operating system
a CD burner
a media player, such as Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, Yahoo! Music Jukebox or SongBird (also open source)

Step1

Download your recorded sound file from your recording device to your computer's hard drive.

Step2

Unless you prefer another sound editing program, download and install Audacity, which is open source, meaning free.

Step3

Opening your file with Audacity Open your sound file by navigating to its folder and selecting it.

Step4

Select what will become an individual music track. Do this by dragging your mouse across the section of your file that you would like to make a track, highlighting it. Copy the data into your mouse by selecting menu item Edit/Copy. If your file is big, this could require a short wait for the hour glass to finish.

Step5

Create a new file just for this track. Do this by opening a new blank file using File/New. Then Edit/Paste the data in your mouse into this new file.

Step6

Clean it up. Use the View/Zoom function to view your data close up, and trim up the beginning and ending seconds of the track. At the beginning, you probably just want a clean cut right up to the first beat. At the end, you might want to let the end reverberate and trail off, for a natural ending. If there is extraneous noise, like people talking in a jam session, or an audience applauding, simply cutting it off will sound chopped in the transition between tracks on your CD. So cut off at a natural place. Then select/highlight the last few seconds before that, and use the menu item Effect/Fade Out. This brings the sound level smoothly down to zero.

Step7

If you like, at this point, you can add about 2 seconds of silence at the end of your track for a professional touch. Position your cursor at the very end of your track and use menu item Generate/Silence. This will give you about 30 seconds of silence, of which you can trim off about 28 seconds, and it will make for a nice transition when you ultimately play back all your tracks.

Step8

Choose a file name and save your track to a .wav or .mp3 file or something your media player will recognize. Close this individual track file and go back to viewing the original large recorded file. Repeat steps 4 through 8 for each track you would like to extract from that file.

Step9

Choose your favorite media player and load your new tracks into a new playlist. Put a blank CD in your CD burner, and use your media player's Burn CD function.

Tips & Warnings

Because of patent issues, Audacity requires the LAME .mp3 encoder to be loaded separately as a plug-in, but this is very easy to do, and the link to obtain this encoder is given on the same page as the Audacity download page.
Although Audacity is billed as working for Windows 98 through Windows Vista, it has been found to consistently crash Windows ME by going into a loop and generating endless temp files until the hard drive is full. But your mileage may vary. Other sound-editing programs that have worked on Windows ME are AudioSurgeon and GoldWave.