How do you make seamless music edits?

[Charlie_Foxtrot]

I've done three songs where i had to trim down the music and/or cut out a middle portion. One of them turned out OK but two them were horribly jarring. How do you guys make it so "flowy" and not off sync after the edit? Please help

[Akira]

It's patience, good hearing, good observation and a good eye otacon.

When you copy a section, just look how the waveforms go, when there's a similar waveform in the desired area, that's where you paste

[dt_]

Here's how I do it.
First off I load the song up in Audacity and trim off the intro section that I don't want. Then I save the audio into a new song folder in StepMania. Next I open DDReam Studio and use it to approximate the BPM of the song. Then I open up StepMania and open up the song in edit mode, set the BPM I found in DS and put in some dummy arrows as quarter notes and adjust the BPM with F11/F12 (or Alt+F11 / Alt+F12) to get it more accurate. Also make sure to change the offset accordingly with I believe F9/F10.

OK now you have StepMania synced up to the song. But you still haven't cut out the middle parts you dont want. So in SM's edit mode, go to the measure where the section you want to cut out, begins. Somewhere on the screen you should see a "time" in the song at which this section begins; say, 45.108. Write this time down! That's how many seconds it is into the song where that section starts. Then go in SM's edit mode to where that section ends and write down that time as well.

Now open up the song again in Audacity and zoom in close until you reach this section. You can click on the waveform at the spot where the beginning of the section is, and then hold Shift and click on the waveform where the end of the section is -- this will *select* the section you would like to remove. Next, just press Delete and the section is removed. Now you can save the audio file and go back to SM's edit mode and see if it turned out nicely.

If you're really careful in Audacity, like to the millisecond, it should be almost seamless

Hope that helps; feel free to ask questions about it!

[ChaosMaster]

I start a simfile for it in SM, and once it's properly synced, I can find what the times are for the beats I want to cut.

[Hiryuu]

Find a loop spot and cut it with Goldwave with Zoom In function?

That's pretty much how I've attacked most of mine. If the after-delete sucks, undo and try again until you've got a good one. Best thing I can tell you is find a similar spot in a song in two places (wherever you're trying to cut) and go from there. If you make it sound like a cymbal crash without incident, let's say, that goes on to the next part of the song you wanted, omitting a part, then you know you've done right.

Basically you're after cutting a loop out of a song like this: here.

If you can cut something like that out that loops well then it's likely to be a part you can yank from a song easily.

Syncing the song to SM is unnecessary but I guess it would help somewhat if you're not one to look at waveforms with comfort...although if the song has numerous BPM changes and you fail at syncing the song a good amount of a second off then your edit will fail if you go by what SM tells you. At least with GW you can be up to a thousandth of a second accurate in terms of that (not sure with Audacity).

[Charlie_Foxtrot]

Wow, thanks for the awesome advice everyone. I'll certainly try those things out. Thanks a milli

[k⁄⁄eternal]

60000 / BPM = number of milliseconds per beat.

Multiply by some power of 2, plug in the number you get as the interval to chop down, and stand by to win.

[Hiryuu]

Originally Posted by k⁄⁄eternal

60000 / BPM = MATH...

Oh god...don't make me do math. I hate math.