- Get your audio tracks.
Use a CD ripper (such as CDex) to “rip” the CD tracks to WAV files (don’t use MP3 - that reduces the sound quality).
Note about naming files - to avoid problems later, use only letters, numbers, space, underscore and hyphen in file names. Avoid using any other symbols or characters.
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Create a folder for this work and copy the audio tracks into that folder (The project will be easier to manage if we keep everything in one place. Also, we are “copying” the audio files rather than “moving” them so that we still have the originals in case we mess up).
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Open Audacity.
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File menu “Save Project” → Navigate in the file browser to the “work folder” that you created in step 2. Give the project a meaningful name, followed by 001 and then save it. (The 001 is so that we can make incremental backups 002, 003, 004 … as we go, then in the event of a disaster it will not be a catastrophe).
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Drag in the first of your tracks and roughly edit it to size - leave a bit extra on each end - that will be tidied up later, I’d suggest leaving at least 10 seconds extra on each end of the clip. (See here for basic editing operations: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/tutorial_editing_an_existing_file.html)
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Export the trimmed audio track as a “WAV” file and give it a unique name (File > Export). If this is going to be the first section of the song, you might want to use “clip01” as part of the name. (use only letters, numbers, spaces, underscore hyphen as described earlier.
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Play the exported file in your usual media player and check that it is OK.
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Close Audacity and restart (not really essential, but it gives a clean start for the next track). No need to save the project as we haven’t yet started the project for real.
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Repeat steps 5 to 8 for the remaining tracks.
You should now have rough copies of each of the clips that you will be using. OK so far?
The next part is the fun part 