Shortening Music with Audacity

Yesterday, I received Sandra Davis’ three disc “Dancing with Your Dog.”  On the second disc, she details how she cuts her music to a useable length.  Then showed a routine that she did with one of her dogs using the music she had shortened.  I’m afraid the cut she made left a lot to be desired, so I thought I’d share how I shorten our music.

I use a freeware program called Audacity which displays your song as wave tracks.  I haven’t coded a song yet as Sandra Davis does, but I suspect it would probably save time in the long run.  I just listen to the song over and over to identify areas where it repeats.  I just figured out how to add labels on a separate track so I can easily re-locate spots that I might want to edit out.  Here is how I worked on “Rockin Robin” sung by Chuck Barry.

I listened a whole lot of times to the song, which is 2:34 long.  I’d like to cut it to about 1:45 and there appear to be three possibilities for shortening this song:  Remove one or both of the two “instrumental only” bits and/or chop out a continuous section and try to have the music and lyrics still make sense.  With a song that has a repeat or a chorus, the second option is a very viable option as long as there is not key change between the two sections. 

 

I opened Audacity and selected the song I want to work on from my music library.

Since removing one section is easier than removing two, I started with the second option.  “Bless my soul, he out-bopped the buzzard and the oriole” occurs twice.  So with a little luck, I might be able to cut out all the stuff in between them.  In the screen shot below, I’ve marked the section between the first and second “oriole.” 

  

The oriole to oriole section is about 34 seconds long.  That would make my edited version about 2:00 minutes long, which is 15 seconds short of my goal.  Hmm.  If I want to stick with my target length, then I will also have to cut one of the instrumentals.  I labeled the longer instrumental section in the screen shot below.  It is about 18 seconds in length.  I had to zoom into the tracks to select the beginning of the this instrumental because Mr. Barry leads into it with a loud and drawn out “Ohhhh” and all traces of that will have to be cut to ensure a smooth transition between the spliced sections of the song.

Now that I have a rough idea of what I want to edit out of this song, it’s time to do the actual cutting.  I'll start with the longer section first (oriole to oriole).  I make a selection of what to cut by ear and simply cut it out and listen to the result.  With any luck, I will cut a little less than needs to actually be removed from the song.  If not, I undo the cut and select a slightly smaller section to cut.  Once I have made a cut that leaves a second or so of extra stuff, I zoom in on where I have made the cut.  It is important to leave a little more than you want because removing it is a whole lot easier than trying to put a little bit back in.  

In the screen shot above, I have made the best rough cut I could, I and will be zooming in on the darkened section of the two tracks to do some fine tuning.  The vertical line on the left side of the oriole to oriole label shows where the two split portions of the song meet.

Here is the section I want to fine tune.  I have really zoomed in on the tracks and less than two seconds of playing time is visible.  There is an annoying echo effect that I suspected was coming from the low amplitude wave between the more massive groupings of waves—just above and to the right of the line on the label track that marks where the two pieces are spliced.  However, trial and error showed me I was wrong. (I’m hoping with experience I will get better at reading the soundtracks, and the whole editing process will become a little less of a hit or miss thing.:-)  The two wave forms connected by the low amplitude wave are very similar in shape, and due to the zoom effect appear to last much longer in time than they actually do.  After listening to the effect of cutting out different little segments, I finally tried removing the first big waveform (which is in the gray zone in the screen shot below), and voila.  Once it was removed, the transition between the two pieces was super smooth, and undetectable by my ear. 

Listen to the two clips and you will hear the difference:

My song is now about 1:59 seconds long in actual playing time.  I will add three seconds of silence at the beginning so I can start my music and have three seconds to set up with my dog when I’m working alone.  I could stick with my original plan and cut out the long instrumental also, but I like the change of pace the instrumental section adds, so for now I’ll leave it in and work with two minutes of music instead of 1:45.

I hope you found this information helpful.

P.S.  10/16/2012.  I found a blogger who describes how to use the draw tool in Audacity to eliminate clipping when you delete a section of your music.