Can I cut a section from a .m4a file?

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1

What I want to do seems like very basic editing, namely, delete a vocal section from a song in itunes. I can select the section I want to remove, but neither the cut button nor the Edit->Remove Special options are enabled. Can I do this in Audacity and end up with a comparable-quality recording, but with a section removed?

Thanks,

David

p.s. using Audacity 2.0.6, with the current plug-ins for handling .m4a files

2

Make sure you STOP playback before editing. You should be able to select/highlight the audio you want to remove, and hit the Delete key on your keyboard.

You might actually want to split the audio into sections and re-splice with a short crossfade for a smoother edit.

Can I do this in Audacity and end up with a comparable-quality recording,

Audacity (like all “normal” audio editors) has to decompress the audio before editing. If you re-compress to a lossy format such as M4A there is potential for quality loss.

[u]mp3directCut[/u] can do limited editing to MP3 and AAC (M4A) files without decompressing them. It can’t make a crossfade, but it can cut, paste, and change the volume.

3

Doug,

Thanks for the info! I’ll give that a try.

David

4

MP3DirectCut has some limitations with M4A and AAC. M4A files must be extracted to raw AAC.

MP3DirectCut can’t adjust volume of AAC files (according to its current documentation, anyway).

Gale