Editing/Clipping Problems

First off, hello all, I’m new to this forum and audio editing so if I ask any dumb questions my apologies in advance and please feel free to fry me.
Recently I copied the BBC4 singer songwriters’ circle from the tv. I caught the second half of the first showing first, then later the same day it was shown again and I caught the beginning. Meanwhile, in between the two showings I’d recorded another couple of music shows. All this was done on dvd so I lifted the whole soundtrack and converted it to .mp3 with the intention of trying to splice the two halves of the songwriters’ circle together, whilst saving the middle two shows as separate files. I saved the whole dvd soundtrack ( 4 an’ a bit hours ) to my hard drive an’ after a little poking around found out about Audacity. I installed it from a non zip file to my macbook pro ( OS X 10.6.8 ) an’ after looking through the help section I found what I thought was the tool for the job; that being the splice function, however, when I tried to do this the option to splice wasn’t highlighted
…that little lot took me about 8 hours an now I’ve got head, back an butt ache and am rapidly thinking I’m way out of my depth so if there’s anyone out there who’s got the patience to help I’d really appreciate any and every bit.

Ta’

Tim

Hi Tim.
Edit functions are not available while Audacity is playing, recording or paused.
If edit options are greyed out, try pressing the “Stop” button.

If you install the optional FFmpeg, then you will probably not need to convert to MP3 before importing into Audacity. For un-encrypted DVDs you should be able to import the VOB files from the DVD into Audacity. See here for installing FFmpeg: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/FAQ:Installation_and_Plug-Ins#ffdown

This tutorial should help with the editing: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/tutorial_editing_an_existing_file.html

The way I would approach the editing task would be to import the files (File > Import > Audio),
Then delete the parts that you don’t want. http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/audacity_selection.html
Position the parts that you do want by sliding them left/right with the time shift tool http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/tools_toolbar.html#timeshift
Then Export the final project in whatever format I required: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/file_export_dialog.html

Thanks Steve, the pointers helped me a lot…I still struggled a little but that’s o.k. as I got there in the end.