Greetings!! I’m the Mom of 3 little kids who are performing their Wushu routine for the school talent show. Now, for the 3 people who are still reading this, I’d be grateful for advice. I’m a big fan of CNET and after reading that Audacity was “easy to use” I thought why not? All I want to do is record a 2 min CD consisting of 2 songs, 1 min each. To make it even easier, I’m just using the first minute of each song. Apparently, even this is wayyyy over my head–I just don’t have enough background knowledge to know where to start. I’ve been trying since Sunday, yup I said Sunday
I have both songs on my itunes library. Can someone point me in the right direction? Where do I go first in the manual? import audio? I have never done anything like this before, so perhaps this really is way out of my league. Is this too difficult a task for a complete novice? Should I just give up and sing the songs for my kids?
Once you get them in you can edit out the bits you don’t want (select the bits you don’t want by clicking and dragging with the cursor anf the delete the selection with the Ctrl+K keyboad shortcut.
To burn a CD you will need to export a 16-bit sterep WAV or AIFF file - see: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Burning_music_files_to_a_CD
this page is from the latest alpha manual I have been working on it for the last two days so it should be an improvement on the released Manual version
No it shouldn’t be too difficult, but as a complete novice there will be a lot of things that are unfamiliar.
The iTunes library is, in my opinion, quite confusing because the list of songs in the library is a database and not the actual music files.
To work on the songs with Audacity you need the “actual music files”.
This tutorial shows you how to find the “actual music files” and then import them: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/How_to_import_files_from_iTunes
If you are able to do that bit then that’s your first success and you are well on the way.
I see that waxcylinder has posted a lot of links that go through the entire process, but if you get stuck feel free to ask.
(we were all complete novices when we started )
THank you so much, I will give it a shot! No, I’ll not even attempt anything close to clever, such as a fade out…unless I get really lucky! this would be better learned thru hands on instruction with an instructor at my shoulder, but I’m going to jump in and try.
DVDDoug: indeed, I have no experience here–this is a far cry from burning a playlist off itunes. My kids think I’m cool to be able to do that, ha!
steve: as soon as my head starts spinning, I’ll be back with more questions.
Thanks all!
Nah, go on spoil yourself - it’s actually easy, all you do is elect the selection for the fade and then apply the required fade.
The “best” fade for fading out, certainly for music" is the excellent Studio Fade Out which Steve wrote and managed to get into that latest Audacity release.
Otherwise, there is a LOT to learn.