Simple Audio Editing 101: Fixing the Beginning and End

Aside from working at Tucows full-time, I also work part-time at a local comedy club. The employees there will usually burn a compilation of tracks to play during and after the show. Those are easy to do. There are also tracks that serve simply as show starters -- five second intros to bring up the comedians. Both require minor editing and in this tutorial I'll teach you how to do it.

One of the biggest issues I've seen with converted music is the lack of care given to these files. Tracks can be cut off, sound like they were taped off the radio, be missing header information or can be ripped from in-store "not for resale" copies that have beeps throughout the song. For the introduction songs I deal with, there are a lot of great songs out there, but a majority of them don't have great introductions themselves. The idea here is to teach you, through a few tutorials, small tricks to edit any piece of audio.

For this tutorial, I'll be using Blaze Media Pro. I've always been a huge advocate for this application. It's so well rounded that it's become a staple on my desktop environment.

To start, once you've installed, you should see the main interface. On the right panel, click on the edit audio feature and open the file you wish to edit.

A perfect song for this tutorial is "My Humps" recorded by the Black Eyed Peas. At the beginning of this track is a trumpet section leading into a beat and at the end is a mellow minute and a half send off. From the screen shot above, you can see where each of those start off.

For the intro, I'm going to select the first part of the audio and zoom in.

Listen to the piece you've selected multiple times to see where you want to cut or edit. In the image below I've selected the area I want to cut out and further below is the result of the cut.

In my example, I've completely edited out the beginning trumpet section of the song. This introduction now starts off with a strong thumping bass -- perfect for intro music. The next half of the editing will cut off the mellow ending making a perfect transition song.

The last part of this tutorial is just a finishing touch for the audio track. You select about five seconds of track from the end and use the fade out function. This feature will cause the track to fade out and make it a perfect transition into the next song.

This song is perfectly edited for both examples I mentioned at the start of the article. You can use this technique for many types of audio, whether it be to cut out commercials in a taped broadcast, or to fix other audio mishaps.