Building A Linux Music Studio
Preparing Tracks For CD
Carla Schroder
Thursday, December 27, 2007 09:57:06 AM
We're going to use SoX to convert the H2's WAV format to the correct format for CD, and the excellent Audacity for editing our tracks. WAV files are not all the same, and sometimes are not in the correct format for CDs--after downloading my recording to the computer, neither Amarok nor K3b recognized its file format. This is fixed by using SoX to convert the WAV to CDR, and then back to WAV:
$ sox STE-001.wav STE-001.cdr
sox STE-001.cdr grange-xmas.wav
STE-001.wav is the filename assigned by the H2. On the second line I change the final filename to something more helpful. At this point I could go ahead and record the file to a CD. But it's one long file, and I would rather have each song on a separate track. So first I make a copy of it for insurance, and then open it in Audacity, and behold a graph appears as in Figure 1.
This particular file starts with a bunch of boring crowd noises, and then has two songs. It's easy to see where they are, so I can go right to the breaks between the songs, and easily delete the junk at the beginning. Just select the junk with the mouse, then hit Delete. (You can always Undo if you make a mistake.)
Now let's figure out our song breaks. Click on a likely spot and hit Play. When you have it figured out, mark the spot with Ctrl+B, and you can type in a label here if you want, like the song name. Repeat for all the songs. Then do File | Export Multiple, and each track will be saved as a separate file.
You'll want to save your work two different ways: exported as a WAV or other playable music file, and also saved as an Audacity project.
Now fire up K3b, or whatever your favorite CD-writing software is, create a new audio project, write your songs to a CD, and you're done. Easy as tipping over, and a lot more fun. Come back next week to learn some of the finer points of music editing, such as normalization, fades, silences, and other useful techniques.
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