Archive for September, 2008
I mentioned In my last post that sometimes when you record from the radio, you often find that there is material at the beginning and at the end you don’t want.
Sometimes it’s part of another program altogether sometimes it’s stuff that you’re not particularly interested in like credits long lists of who the people are and so on.
And if this is the situation, then maybe the best thing is to cut off the beginning and at the end of your recording so that you are left only with what you want
There are quite a lot of ways of doing this but I’m going to suggest doing it directly with a programme called MP3 direct cut, which you can download for free – details of course on the free resources page and in the last blog post – Cutting and Splitting Your Audio Files.
Now a word of warning before you begin:
This is a destructive process – that means you’re actually going to destroy your file while you cut pieces out.
So my advice in these circumstances is always to make a copy of your file so that if anything goes wrong or you want to change things later you have the original file to work on.
This of course is good practice in working with files quite often because even if everything goes more or less well, you might have a power cut or a computer crash.
So the whole question of working on copies on backing up your files is quite an important one well be looking at a later.
Another precaution you can take is to save files under a different name.
I’m going to do it all directly, but I do make the point that it’s best to work on a copy of your original.
If you open up your file in MP3 Direct Cut – in this case the file is the Natural History of Selbourne, which I recorded earlier – you’ll be able to press the Play button and you’ll soon find that it isn’t quite what you want.
You’ll find that in MP3 Direct Cut there are whole range of controls the you can use to help you.
As the very beginning of the file is not what you want the first thing to do is to press the button, called Set Begin.
MP3 Direct Cut – Set Begin
This will instruct the programme where you want to begin to cut away the first part of the programme don’t want.
You can then continue playing the file or use the drag bar at the top to help you to get to the part of the recording which you actually want to cut away.
MP3 Direct Cut – Drag
That is of course just before the part of the recording that you want begins.
When you find that place, just press the Stop button
MP3 Direct Cut – Stop
And at that point you can press the Set End button.
MP3 Direct Cut – Set End
You’ll see that the part of the recording that you want to delete is highlighted in light blue and when you’re sure that’s the bit you want to delete press the delete key on your keyboard.
After that, you can go to File, choose Save All, and save your file overwriting the file that you are using.
MP3 Direct Cut – Save All
The programme will warn you twice if you really want to do this and each time you should say yes.
What you’ll now have is a shorter file, a file which begins at the place that you want it to begin.
The next thing you’re going to do is to cut the end of your file away.
This is done really more or less in the same way.
You open the file and you play the recording or you drag the recording until you’re more or less, where you want to be. (You know, the recording should be about 65 minutes long so that gives you a good idea.)
You get to the place where you want the end of your recording to be and again this time you’ll press the Set Begin button which will show you where you want your cut to begin.
Then simply drag your file to the very end and you can press the Set End button.
Once again, the range to cut away will be highlighted.
Press the delete key and to File – Save All and you’ll then have the recording of the natural history of Selbourne, without any irrelevant information at the beginning or the end
As I said, last post was a bit of a diversion but if you’ve downloaded “The Confessions of Saint Augustine” you’ll have found that even though it’s been split into ten files, each file is over an hour long.
You might want to split each file into smaller segments so that you can find each part more easily on your audio player.
A short while ago I suggested recording from the radio.
If you do this, you’ll probably get files which are not only rather long – Gilbert White’s the “Natural History of Selbourne”is over an hour for example but,
You’ll also probably have bits at the beginning and end of your recording which you don’t want.
You might like to cut off the unwanted portions of the recording – top and tail so to speak.
Soon, I’ll go through how to cut and split recordings step by step but for now, let’s go and get the free software to do the job.
You’ll need:
mp3 Direct Cut (http://mpesch3.de1.cc/mp3dc.html)
and
Slice Audio File Splitter (http://www.nch.com.au/splitter/index.html)
together with a component part
mp3el (http://www.nch.com.au/components/index.html)
(This is vital as without it, you’ll get no sound.
Details also on the Free Resources Page.
Next time, we’ll look at cutting and splitting in detail.
