Audio Clip Editing for Dave…

28 Nov 2009

So, I’m a fan of the Sick and Wrong Podcast. I often enjoy spreading the word about said program as I’ve found that many of the people I interact with have a similar passion for this planet’s oddities. Dave, however, has been especially resistant to my requests to audit this fine program. His typical response is a cynical jab: “Do you watch Fringe”. This makes sense because I have been opposed to spending 30 minutes of my time on this rock to view this program ( Fringe )… Which leads me to my next point.

Opening a single episode and finding that you are 1.5 hours from completion can be daunting. I’ve closed many a youtube video as soon as I realize it’s going to last more than 20 or 30 seconds. Thus I can understand Dave’s apprehension. It’s difficult to invest 1+ hours of your internet time in a single location. And assuming you like it, you’re immediately 201 episodes behind. At an average run time of 1.5 hours you’re talking 12.5 earth days of catching up.

At any rate, my task today is to grab a short clip from the most recent podcast to pass along to Dave in hopes that he will climb aboard with the rest of us. Of course, I’m a audio/video idiot which makes it a bit of a challenge. Sure, people do this all the time, I however do not.

** Dave, please skip to the end of this article for your clip **

I’m hoping this is really quick and solidifies my choice of linux on my Dell XPS1340 that is coming next week. I’m running Ubuntu 9.04 and I did a quick search for: “linux edit audio file”. That took me to a page ( the number 1 listing ) for audacity. I scanned the site and realized it would do what I needed and proceeded to load it up.

A quick aptitude search gives the available packages:
[7:20am] giant:/tmp# aptitude search audacity i audacity - A fast, cross-platform audio editor i A audacity-data - A fast, cross-platform audio editor (data) p audacity-dbg - A fast, cross-platform audio editor (debug) [7:20am] giant:/tmp#
then:
[7:20am] giant:/tmp# apt-get install audacity
To install what audacity needs to run.

At this point I went to Applications>Sound & Video and expected to see Audacity in the list. It was not. So I proceeded to run it from the command line. As root this gave me an error that Audacity could not find a place to store it’s temporary files. So I switched back to my normal less privileged user and voila, the GUI came up.

Next I clicked on File>Open and browsed to the place where I saved the Sick And Wrong podcast 202 and loaded it into audacity. The full episode can be found here, by the way.

Once it was loaded up, I clicked at the 1hr 30min point and it drew a line as a start point. I clicked play and validated that this was in fact where I wanted to start. I clicked around in the menus in hopes of finding something that said “clip”, that wasn’t to be found so I went back to my start point and used the tried and true method of holding down the shift key and using my right arrow. Sure enough this started building a range on the audio graphic that was selected.

Once I had the area I wanted I clicked around in the menus looking for something equivalent to “crop”… again I was disappointed, so I just clicked “cut” from the edit menu. I then clicked new, brought up a new window and clicked edit and paste. At this point I had the abbreviated output in a new window. It’s a miracle!

The next step was to save. If you try to “save as” it will attempt to save your work as a project. I just wanted an mp3 so the next choice from the File menu was obviously “export”. This prompted me for a bunch of naming crap which I don’t care about, so I just passed it by. The next window ask where I wanted to save and the format, I chose mp3. When I tried to save I got an error that a library was not available for the exporting of mp3 data. It named the missing library and I used apt-get to load it up:
[7:46am] giant:/tmp# apt-get install libmp3lame0
I then attempted the export a second time and it completed.

Here is the finished product:

Dave Download This