Free Music Editing Software - Audacity

Need to Edit Music Files for Free? Need to remove a certain word or mute part of a track? Need to create a custom soundtrack?

All this can be accomplished using free software called Audacity. This blog is intended to explore the capabilitites of using Audacity, a free sound editor, to combine several songs together and export them as a mp3. Audacity uses the file extension .aup and all edits are saved with this extension. This extension will only open in Audacity and playback in Audacity.

For an overview on how to use the program, check out this tutorial that provides an Audacity Overview for use with high school students - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/Audacity_High_School.pdf

If you need to find source music files to import into your project then check out Royalty Free Music - Freeplay - www.freeplaymusic.com or Incomptech - http://www.incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/

Audacity is a free, yet powerful, sound editing software that allows you to customize and combine sound files. In addittion, you can add a series of sound effects to customize your sounds even further. When you are done you export your project files as a .wav or .mp3 to be used with numerous other multimedia software like PowerPoint, Movie Maker or PhotoStory.

Below is a set of free resources that are related to the Audacity Program.

Free Resources

Tutorial w/screen shots - http://www.wikieducator.org/Using_Audacity or http://audacity.sourceforge.net/manual-1.2/tutorials.html

Free Download Software for Home - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/

Lame Encoder for exporting as .MP3 - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/faq?s=install&item=lame-mp3 (you will need this file if you plan on exporting your final edited sound files as a .mp3)