Hi, I am new to the forums. I hope everyone will indulge me if I inadvertently make any faux pas. Last Fall, I had downloaded a demo version of cool edit 2000 (the lower version for $70), but couldn't get it to do anything, so I held off on buying. So now, I am back looking at music editing programs for my PC and have found that Adobe bought cool edit, discontinued the 2000 version and is selling their version of cool edit pro for $300. I am also looking at Sound Forge for the same price. I am pretty positive that I don't need all the features of either program. I can get the Sound Forge demo to work, at least. The Adobe Audition doesn't seem to offer a demo version. Basically, I would like to be able to take measures out of the middle of music, make it shorter, fade in or out. Now, it would also be cool to be able to take out words I dislike, change them to a sound, make the voices sound electronic or take the words out completely (I hear you can do this sometimes, depending on how the piece of music was mixed), mix two songs together, etc. I am someone that can sight read music and certainly count music, but um I don't know an amp from the hole in my wall for an electrical plug. Many times I am simply unfamiliar with the terms the program is using. Probably the feature that is most important to me is intuitive Ease of Use for those who are not sound technicians or radio disc jockeys. Does anyone have any experience with these programs and could offer some advice or comments to help my buying decision? Is there anything cheaper out there that can do what I want? I only have pc s to work on. Thank you for any help.

This should be doable with any editing program, CoolEdit, SoundForge, etc. If you want to alter the tempo of the music, by speeding it up or slowing it down, some programs can do this, too without affecting the pitch too much. The adjustment range tends to be small, like 10 percent or so without running into really bad artifacts.

However, a lot of this work is just brute force application of time, where you'll have to hand-edit every cut and fade, listening carefully to make sure you don't have undesirable clicks or pops. There's really no automated way to do this well, so be prepared to spend a lot of time if you are going to cut-n-paste music together.

A lot of the quality also depends on the kind of music you use. I'd say that acoustically recorded music like an orchestra is harder to cut-n-paste together with no audible artifacts than something that's a bit more synthetic, like techno or some pop music.

This gets very hard to do well. Some karaoke programs/machines can supress the voice, but it really depends on the music, and the result usually doesn't sound very good. At this point, you'll have to get really sophisticated audio tools, stuff that's used for audio forensics, and spend a lot of money and time doing it. Is there some other way around the problem, perhaps by changing the choreography, or making the dance take the words into account?

Being able to read music is very valuable, because if you're making any edits to a piece of music, it's easy to mark up the score with your edits so when you go back to cut everything together, you'll have an easy reference.

--Andre

<small>[ 14 September 2003, 01:32 PM: Message edited by: Andre Yew ]</small>

You can probably do most of what's possible for free with the sound editing program Audacity.

I quote from the Audacity web site:

Here's a screenshot:
[img=http://audacity.sourceforge.net/images/audacity-1.2.0-pre1.png]

<small>[ 14 September 2003, 02:04 PM: Message edited by: citibob ]</small>

Thank you both for the insights. My intention is to use the program over and over to edit different pieces of music. Many times words aren't even an issue, just it would be nice to be able to do. Someone had told me that with some older music, if the voice was recorded on a seperate track, I should be able to take it out and create an instrumental version. I will definitely check out the free program. lololol. Thank you very much.