Audacity is a free audio editing program that will serve many of your needs while remaining a relatively simple program to learn.
What this is useful for:
Extracting selections of audio from a larger/longer audio file to use in a presentation in
Powerpoint, on a website, use in an exam etc.
Go to http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ and download the free program called Audacity
Once the program is installed and you have it open go to file in the top left of the screen and
select import – Audio
Find the audio file you want to edit and click choose
Once your audio file is open it will be represented by the blue amplitude image in the
center of the panel. You can often see visually where pauses, climaxes, movement breaks
and other musical events happen and to help you view the file you can zoom in and out
using Command + 1 and Command + 2 respectively. You can also identify sections of
the file by simply using the play and skip buttons in the top left of the audacity window.
Note – Remember that you can undo any of your actions and the original file will not
be changed as long as you export the file with a different file name than the original.
Once you know what section of the audio file you want to extract click and drag the mouse
over the selection. The selection will be grey and it can be manipulated once selected in a
variety of ways.
To keep the selection and remove all other parts of the sound file go to edit and select trim.
If you want to delete the selection leaving the remaining parts of the audio file simply press
delete
If you want to place a fade in and a fade out in your excerpt select a small portion at the
beginning of the file (you can see how long it is in seconds by the minutes and seconds
scale above the audio image). Go to effect in the top menu and select fade in. The sound file
will now have an automatically generated fade in for the amount of time that you selected.
Repeat the process for fading out.
Once you have finished editing go to file and click export. You can edit the files information
here and then select the file format and file name. There are multiple choices for the file
type to export. Use .wav file as a default for normal use and other files if you specifically
need them.
