Make a custom mix CD
While a straight-ahead music mix is fine for most purposes, you might want to add your own fingerprints to the individual songs by making some edits. For example, you can punch up a drum break by adding a little reverb or apply your own fade-outs and fade-ins to individual tracks. This is where Audacity, a free, open-source audio editor, enters the picture. Once you've fired up Audacity, go to the File menu item, click open, and browse your PC for the audio file you want to tweak. The song will appear in the program as a large, two-track waveform; you can use the zoom tools to zero in on a particular section. Once you've found the edit points, highlight the section using your mouse and click the Effect menu item. A drop-down list will allow you to choose from nearly 30 effects, including compression, delay, and phasing. Each effect has its own set of sliders for tweaking individual parameters, so unless you're an expert, you'll probably need to fiddle around with them and preview the results before you're satisfied. Once you hit OK, Audacity will process the changes to the song; you can then revisit the File menu to export it as a WAV, MP3, or OGG file. If you want to go one step further and include commentary or personalized messages for the disc's recipient, Audacity's built-in sound recorder does the job nicely. After plugging a microphone into your sound card, change Audacity's recording source to Microphone by using the drop-down box that's located near the top middle of the program's interface. Hit the large red-circle icon to begin recording, taking care to adjust the input volume to avoid nasty-sounding digital distortion. After you've found the optimum recording level and captured your message, hit the Stop button and export the file to your hard drive. Once you've added the file to iTunes's music library, you can simply drag it into your mix playlist.
Once all the audio files sound like you want them to, you can now go ahead and write your mix to a disc. Highlight the playlist, open your computer's CD drive, and insert a blank disc. After you click the Burn Disc icon, iTunes will quickly check your playlist. If it's too long for the capacity of disc you're using (most hold about 74 minutes' worth of music), the program will prompt you to remove some songs. Then, just sit back or go grab a drink while iTunes burns your mix to disc. After the program finishes writing the disc, you should probably test it in a few different CD players to make sure it works OK on different equipment. | ||||||||
)
)
Step 1: Assemble the mix disc- Talkback
-
There are currently no comments for this story.
To post comments, you need to become a member. It's FREE.
