Basic Editing of a Track from a Music CD

To do very precise audio editing you are likely to find that a dedicated Audio Editor is better suited for the task:

http://www.thehangtime.com/gb/gbfaq2.html#audioeditors

(BTW, since you're using GB2, why didn't you post in the GB2 forum?)

This time I disagree, HT: If the song you're sampling from has a steady, integer measure, GB is better suited than audio editors - once you figured out the beat and aligned the song, you can take practically an piece of one or two or four measures and loop it. That's something the audio editors don't offer.

I would agree if you had made the recordings, but trying to beat match a song from someone else's recording isn't much fun to me, and I can (and have) done prefect editing with an audio editor. I find it more difficult to get cuts at the real zero crossing with GB leaving artifacts in the region when looped.

I'll stick with my answer, but to each his own B)

HT,
Very interesting. I have done extensive editing in GB and have never even considered using an audio editor until now. I will have to give one a try next time. Editing in GB, precise editing, can be maddening. Expanding the time line out to its extreme and using the editing window in conjunction with the timeline is a discombobulating affair at best. Enough to try the patients of even the most salted editor. I know all the tricks for precise editing in GB having spent hundreds of hours now doing it and I always curse the makers of GB for not having done any real editing themselves. If they had done even the most rudimentary editing GB would not handle audio editing as poorly as it does.

I know you have a FAQ on audio editors but I'm curious which program do you like the best. I think i'll give it a try next time I'm looking at a ten hour stretch in GB.

As for finding the bpm of a piece: Though there's software that claims to do this automatically, I find it the easiest to play the song in iTunes and let GB play with the metronome on until the clicks match the beat of the piece. (Although other music programs offer the possibility of "fractional" bpm like 121.75, I found that most pieces of modern music have an integer value.)

As for the audio software: The most important difference between Audacity and SoundStudio for me is that Audacity offers separate pitch and tempo shifts, i.d. you can slow down or speed up a song without affecting the pitch. Or vice versa. At least my version of SoundStudio doesn't offer this, the latest version might have it. And of course, Audacity is free while you have to pay a modest price for SoundStudio.

If you want to match the bpm of two pieces and have to do that often, you might consider one of the DJ programs that do perfectly aligned transitions automatically, even live. Do a search with "DJ" in the MacOS x section. If you only need it occasionally, doing a little bit of math and nudging the tracks until they fit might do the trick.

For soft transitions, create an overlap of the two pieces in two tracks and use the volume curves to draw "ramps" for the fading in and out.

Chametzoo,

When I match a beat I listen first, then I look. Thats just the way I was trained, and that how my experience has been accumulated. I listen then I look for the edit. as for softening a transition point usually if the edit point is correct there is no need, however there are lots of little trick to be used. Its hard to say what they are. When the situation arises then I know what to do. For what your doing it seems GB should be fine.

You said you are a photographer. I have a BFA in photography as a fine art from The Rochester Institute Of Technology.

Expanding the time line out to its extreme
and using the editing window in conjunction with the
timeline is a discombobulating affair at best.

Especially when I know I can do it in a real editor in a few seconds.

I'm curious which program do you like the best.

I'm not sure about "Best" because I actually have only been using one for the last 6-8 years, Peak. The Pro version is a bit pricey, but the LE version works well, let's me zoom right in to see exactly where a zero-cross is and make perfect edits.

GB could be an excellent editor but absolutely no thought was given to it. I don't know if editing features were part of the request list or not. The list got so long I couldn't read it! I was hoping that GB3 would have had stronger editing features but alas all of us keep forgetting GB was only meant to supplement iMovie really. Now its subservient to Podcasting.

I'll have to give PEAK a look. I don't really want to leave GB when I'm dealing with things. Audacity never seems to work correctly whenever I open it in my machine.

For ever twenty years I edited in a 30 frames per second environment where I would mark my audio point on the fly as it moved past my ears. Marking ins and outs that way while the music is playing always gave me a sense of the music beat and after a while I only needed to quickly trim a frame here or there on the ins and outs to get a perfect edit. This whole visual style of editing the waveform used today is in one sense very helpful yet in another sense removes the ephemeral sense of music moving thru time while "feeling" the beat. Feeling that beat has always been my strong point.

I agree that editing is much easier in a stand alone program. I've been very happy with Amadeus, also modestly priced. It can use plugins whereas Sound Studio doesn't. I used to love Audacity until I got my Firewire 410. They don't play well together at all.