How-To Edit Your MP3′s With Audacity!

If you are like me, than you have hundreds, if not thousands of MP3 files (obtained legally of course!) in your music library. If you are also like me, than you would also hate how a lot of songs end in meaningless skits. This is especially true with music in the Hip-Hop genre. I just can’t stand listening to songs with useless filler or skits at the end or beginning of it. When I listen to music, I like to do exactly that and not listen to people talking with each other or skits that pretend to be funny. I usually just skip to the next song if that happens. With Audacity though, I’ll show you how to easily cut out useless parts of a song so that you’ll never have to put up with that nonsense ever again!

There are many uses for Audacity, the popular and free music editor. Besides using it to edit out fillers and skits in songs, I also use it to make my own ring tones! Audacity allows you to import a song and chop it up however you want. You can delete parts you don’t like, record from your microphone (great if you want to start your own podcast), change the pitch of a song, remove background noises, export your finished project to MP3 and so much more! For a more detailed listing of what Audacity can do, check out their features page.

In this post, I’ll go over how to perform a simple edit with Audacity that gets rid of unwanted portions of a song (don’t lie, you know there are parts of a song that you wish was never there in the first place!). If you are familiar with the cut and paste method when it comes to words, you’ll be right at home here. I’m no audiophile myself so you can be sure that what I’m doing here can be done by anyone else as well and so no extensive knowledge of how MP3s work is required, unless of course you need to perform more advanced editing.

Using Audacity to Delete a Portion of a Song

You can download Audacity from here.

If you’ll want to export your project back out to MP3 format, you’ll also need to download the free LAME MP3 Encoder to go along with Audacity. Download the ZIP option. After Audacity and the encoder have been downloaded, go ahead and install Audacity first. Next, you’ll want to unzip the contents of the ZIP file, which should be only one folder. I recommend you unzipping or moving the folder into Audacity’s main folder in Program Files. When you first export a Audacity project to MP3, the program will prompt you to locate a MP3 encoder, which is the lame_enc_dll file as shown below. Good news is that you only have to do this once.

With that out of the way, we can now begin editing our songs!

# Fire up Audacity and simply drag and drop a song into the main gray area to begin editing. As mentioned earlier, one of my main reason for using Audacity is to use it to cut out useless fillers at the end of a song and that’s exactly what I’m going to do here!

Alright, so how do you think I’ll proceed next if I want to cut that part out? Well, I could simply delete it! You’re probably laughing but that’s exactly all that needs to be done in this case. Once you import a song in Audacity, every part of it can be edited. In my case, I simply highlight the desired portion I want to work with and I hit the delete button on my keyboard. Just like that, I easily took out the annoying skit at the end so that I no longer have to hear it!

# All that’s left to do is to export the song back into a new MP3 file. Hit the File menu and select Export As MP3. If this is your first time doing so, Audacity will now prompt you to locate your own MP3 encoder. Simply browse to the folder with the LAME encoder you extracted earlier and select the LAME encoder dll file. Audacity should never ask of this again. Now you’ll want to select a location to export the MP3 file to. I simply chose the Desktop.

That’s it! I can now replace that exported version from Audacity with the original file I had and now I don’t ever have to worry about listening to those annoying skits again! Don’t be fooled though. Audacity can do so much more if you explore around a bit.

You can also use Audacity to create ring tones from your favorite songs! No longer must you spend more money buying the ring tone as you already have the song in your music library! Another advantage by using Audacity is that you can have the utmost control in how you want the ring tone to sound. Simply import your song, highlight the part you want as your ring tone and click on the Trim Outside Selection button. Export the selection as MP3 and you have just made your own ring tone that easily!

Wondering if you can add sound effects? Sure can do! Simply highlight the portion and click on the Effects or Generate menu on top to look at all the amazing effects you can produce. Want to add in a portion of a song to another to create your unique mix? Sure can! Just cut, paste and export. That’s all there is to it. You can now spice up your podcast a bit by throwing in a theme song at the beginning and end. While there are certainly limitations on what you can do with Audacity, it is a excellent sound editor for performing minor tasks like those mentioned above and best of all, it doesn’t have a price tag on it!