mp3 editing tools

Flameproof, how EXACTLY do you cut up the lesson? I mean, what tools/software do you use to do that? Thanks.

Flameproof, how EXACTLY do you cut up the lesson? I mean, what tools/software do you use to do that?

I use Cool Edit, I have that since ages. However, it's not freeware. For FREE I suggest Audacity. I haven't tried it, so let me know.....

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

flameproof, thanks for the link. this looks good. i was looking for such programme for a while now...

are you a Russian speaker by any chance?

Split this from the Chinesepod discussion.

Another vote for audacity - very useful tool and very easy to use. Maybe takes a little time to figure out what you can do with it, but worth the effort. If you do a search on audacity you'll find previous comments about it.

There's also a portable version of Audacity. No install required, so you can carry it around on a USB key.

Was going to write more about audacity yesterday but didn't have time.

Audacity is useful as it lets you lay out multiple soundtracks on one page, lets you listen to one, some or all of them at one time, lets you copy and paste bits of sound around the same way you do with text in Word, and you can save it all as a project file so it's all there when you come back to it later.

As an example, you could have a recording from your textbook in mp3 format. You open it with audacity and listen to it a few times. Then you record yourself reading the same line. Then you mute the textbook version and listen to yourself, try to spot what's wrong then rerecord minus (hopefully) the mistakes. Then you compare your second version with the model and realize you are still getting one sound wrong. So you highlight just that bit of audio and listen to it 10 times, comparing it with your version. You're still not quite sure what's going on, so you slow it down by 50% and that helps a bit. So you record your third version, and while it isn't perfect you feel fairly happy with it. Then you're tired so you save it and go to bed. The next morning you open it up again and review your first, second and third attempts with fresh ears, taking note of the changes you made for future reference.

I am not sure about Audacity, but CoolEdit has a "de-noise" function. It works really great on old tapes to get rid of the often strong background hiss noise.

I think Audacity can do that too. It would be great for the FSI fans out there.....

Audacity does, never used it though.

Many thanks for the links guys,

It will be very useful...

Thanks Flameproof. Nice.

I practice my 听力 by listening Chinese MP3 (textbook recordings + podcasts). Do you know what software could help me to select some parts of these MP3 and save them as another MP3 file. For instance this would be very usefull for CRI news as I usually only listen a small part of them; the great thing would be to save these parts and then make compilations. Thanks

You may wish to consider mp3 knife. I have not used it before but it looks very user-friendly. Here is a video showing you how to use it -> http://www.vcsoftwares.com/smk.avi

Try this

http://mpesch3.de1.cc/

Thanks for these suggestions. Any idea how to convert a Windows Media file to MP3 format (CRI news are all in .wma) ? Thanks

See here, and click on the "Free MP3 WMA Converter".

Imron you rock thanks mate...

Any idea how to convert a Windows Media file to MP3 format (CRI news are all in .wma) ?

I use FreeRip -> http://www.mgshareware.com/frmmain.shtml

Used it last night to convert the theme song of "Six Million Dollar Man" from wma to mp3 for my brother.

Thanks, it helps a lot.

Just one more question, is that normal that a 2 M wma file gives a 8 M MP3 file ?

More or less. WMA has better compression than MP3, but you should be able to tweak the conversion parameters to get a smaller size (using lower bitrates etc).