Sorry I haven’t been writing posts in a while, things have been really hectic on my side. However, my guilty conscience has got the better of me so here I am.

For my wedding in December, my wife decided to walk down the aisle to the song Everything by Lifehouse. If you know the song, you will realise that it takes about 2 minutes to get to the chorus which is the part we wanted to hear. With the chapel being a total of 10 meters long, it means my poor wife would have to walk at a snail’s pace of 5 meters a minute (or 83.3 mm a second) whilst all of the audience die of boredom…Sorry, I’m an Engineer :-).

My point is that the song was too long and I had to shorten it. So I dusted off my computer and started my creation. First I had to get the song off the CD. I did this by inserting the CD with Ubuntu Studio running and up popped a cool little program known as Sound Juicer. All you have to do is tick the tracks you want and click on extract. But wait, before you click extract, quickly go to preferences and change the output format to: CD Quality, Lossless (FLAC Audio). This means that when your song is extracted it will be of the highest quality possible.

Cool, so we have the song extracted, now we can start editing it. Start up Audacity and open the .flac file you just extracted from the CD. Basically what I wanted to do was shift the second verse so that it started after the second bar of the intro (As seen in the figure below).

The red arrow shows how the second verse will be moved to just after the intro.
The red arrow shows how the second verse will be moved to just after the intro.

This is quite easy to do. Simply select the area between the two points you want to join and press the Delete button on your keyboard. I recommend that you zoom in to make the selection of the area more precise. Note that you should try to split the song between notes, that way you won’t hearing a clipping sound when the switch is played backed.

If you do hear a clipping sound at the point where the two pieces meet – don’t panic, there is a solution. You can zoom in very close to the area where the two points meet and correct the wave by drawing it in. Let me show you… In the figure below you can see that I have zoomed in to the waveform so closely that I can see the step where the two parts of the song meet badly. This step is what causes the clipping sound.

When zoomed in closely, the connection between the two waves is clearly mismatched. This step is causes a clipping sound when the song is played back.
When zoomed in closely, the connection between the two waves is clearly mismatched. This step causes a clipping sound when the song is played back.

Using the draw tool, which is shown in the picture below, I can simply draw over the step and make it smoother until the clipping noise goes away.

The draw tool
The draw tool

Below is a picture showing where the one channel has been corrected with the draw tool. Don’t forget to correct both channels if you’re working with stereo.

The wave on the top has been smoothed out with the draw tool to stop the clipping noise.
The wave on the top has been smoothed out with the draw tool to stop the clipping noise.

Below I have attached a short .mp3 clip of the edited intro just to show you how it sounds. Take a listen and try to find the point at which the two parts meet.

EverythingEditedIntro.mp3

Other posts you might find interesting:

How to Capture Audio from Video
Beginner’s Guide to Ubuntu Audio Recording
My Favourite Linux Audio Effects
Hydrogen Drum Machine Basics
Microphone Review: Shure’s SM57