Digital Audio Editing

The editing of digital audio may involve several activities including extraction or recording of audio sources from CDs, DVDs, VCRs, audio tapes, audio files, and records; cutting, and modifying the acquired audio; and mixing various sources together to create one audio product. These activities are usually performed on a computer which equipped with specialized hardware and software. We briefly describe some of these activities below:

Often we may wish to use only part of an audio source or pieces of several audio sources to create our edited song. We use special audio editing software to select and copy the desired portions of audio. This process is called cutting.

Cutting:

The cut portion may need to be viewed magnified in order to delete the beginning and/or end of the cut audio to trim to exactly the desired audio selection.

Trimming:

Two or more cut selections may need to be spliced or mixed together. The pieces may spliced end to end or overlapped with cross fading. This process requires a good musical ear to synchronize the beat, pitch, tempo, and volume of the combined cuts. This example shows two cuts being combined, overlapping with cross fade; the volume of the upper cut is reduced slowly while the volume of the second cut is increased more rapidly.

Aligning and cross fading:

Multiple cuts may be combined to complete the edited audio. This is an example with sources from recorded voice, CD tracks, and synthesized sound.

Mixing:

The mixed audio is then combined (called mix down) to a single file.

Mixed Down:

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