Hola Amigos

If I record a whole concert or a long lesson I then want to have software so that I can break it up into the different tracks and then burn a CD to give to the student or to keep for myself.
Does anyone know of any software that does this and is not too difficult to use.

Many thanks

Tomás

I think that you have hit on a fairly esoteric bit of electrical engineering, as far as I can see on a quick check.

Take a look at
http://www.mtg.upf.edu/static/mass/software/index.htm and
http://www.irisa.fr/metiss/ozerov/index.html#software
which are related. These two offer a current VST plug-in and provide some demos of it working.

I haven't been able to find the cloud service noted in the abstract below.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_ ... er=5708450

Bryon, I think Tomás used the term "tracks" to mean what disk recording engineers used to call "cuts" on records and that others commonly misuse now to describe individual musical pieces recorded on tape or in digital memory where nothing is "cut" instead of to mean separate recordings of guitar, vocal, audience noise, etc. made with a multitrack audio recorder so the levels of those various components can be balanced to achieve desired effects after performances. I thought the same thing you did when I first read his post and then realized what he probably wants to do. You are correct that software that is able to separate mixed components such as guitar, vocal, audience noise, etc. from a single track to multiple tracks is esoteric. That task is somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible depending on the components to be separated, the quality of a mixed recording, and other factors, but "chopping" a single long recording into individual "cuts," which I think is what Tomás wants to do, is simple.

Tomás, before one of us explains how you can do that, please confirm that is what you want to do and let us know whether the computer you will use has a Windows, Mac or Linux operating system.

-Bob

Ah, yes, I'm sure you're right. I should have defaulted to the easier option.

Hola Amigos

Thank you all and yes Bob you are right.
My concert has 18 pieces of music with applause.

I want to burn a CD which will contain all or maybe only some of those pieces with or without applause.
Then it is possible to listen to the CD just like any other CD.

At the moment my CD has only one piece of music on it which is about one hour and fifty minutes long.

I have windows vista.

Gracias

Tomás

Very good. That's just cutting the cake into nice slices, not separating the flour from the sugar after it's baked!! Happily, there are many slicing tools. I'll defer suggestions to others; I use Mac OS.

Tomás, a large number of Windows-compatible programs are available to do what you want. They range in capabilities from basic to complex and in price from free to thousands of dollars. However, there isn't much correlation between capabilities and price. Some free ones have nearly all the capabilities of the expensive ones. Asking users which is best can be a like asking guitarists which guitar is best, because they all have pros and cons that various users consider to be more or less important.

There are both automatic and manual methods of breaking a long recording with multiple musical pieces into parts. Some programs can do that automatically based on silent periods between pieces. Users specify how long a period of silence must last and how low the sound level must be to constitute silence. That method could be useful where a music teacher wants to record a series of examples in a single session, or during lessons for individual students, and then have the software quickly break the recording into pieces on a CD without user intervention, but it generally is not useful with live concert recordings or in any professional or semiprofessional application where it is important to carefully determine starting and ending times. Even in making music instruction CD's the automatic method may not work reliably enough, as for example, where it might break a Sevillanas into multiple recordings. Even though manual editing requires user intervention and takes more time, it is the only way to reliably obtain professional results.

Manual music editing works in principle like text editing, where sections of a long text document can be copied and pasted to form smaller documents, and like image editing, where portions of a large image can be copied and pasted to form smaller images. The difference is that sound has to be plotted graphically to enable the copy and paste process. That is done by plotting sound amplitude on the vertical axis against time on the horizontal access of a computer screen chart. Users can then select portions they want to copy and paste to other files using a keyboard or mouse. Selected portions can be played before copying to verify that selections are correct. The process is very simple and easy to do with most programs designed to enable sound-file editing.

To better explain how the process works I loaded a Juan Martin Sevillanas tutorial recording into the Cool Edit Pro program. This is the screen plot of that recording.


The left side shows Juan talking before he starts playing the guitar. The two breaks between the three sevillanas are short, but easy to see. I selected the center sevillana using the mouse and could have copied and pasted it out to a separate file, just as if it was a block of text in a text document. The top of the image shows the left audio channel. If you scroll the image down you will see the right channel. Normally they are both copied and pasted together in single operations, but the left and right channels can be copied and pasted separately if desired.

The Cool Edit Pro program I used above was a great program in its time, but it was purchased and renamed "Audition" by Adobe years ago. Adobe has purchased many great programs, bloated them with rubbish features, introduced all sorts of security vulnerabilities, and jacked up the price. That is what happened to Cool Edit Pro. I have both it and Audition and prefer Cool Edit Pro even though it is several years older.

Sony's Sound Forge Audio Studio 10 has similar capabilities and is a little less expensive than Audition. Audition is currently US$99. Sound Forge Audio Studio 10, which I also have, is US$64.99. However, there is no need to spend anything, because there are free programs that have plenty of features and work great.

Audacity is one example of many. It is free, easy to use, and very popular, but the last stable version was released in 2006. That version has become somewhat outdated and it can't be used with a 64-bit computer. However, a new beta version that is 64-bit compatible was released December 11, 2011. I have both the old 2006 version and the new beta version installed. Either of them will do what you want to do. The new beta version has new capabilities, but probably also still has a few bugs. You can install either version from here http://audacity.sourceforge.net/.

Traverso DAW is another free audio editing program. I haven't used it, but it looks good and probably will do what you want. This is a link to the setup program if you would like to give it a try http://traverso-daw.org/download/binaries/current/windows/.

There are many other alternatives, but one of the two free programs above should do what you want.

-Bob

That's a really great tutorial on application selection. Audacity has got to be the leading tool by use, and not just because of price.

I love the array of sound and video tools that is now available. I constantly use iTube Studio to download web videos and convert them to formats that can be played in other software, including Ultimate DVD Player to then play them at varying speeds--providing video slowdown in synch with audio slowdown.

byron wrote:That's a really great tutorial on application selection. Audacity has got to be the leading tool by use, and not just because of price ..

I should have mentioned that Audacity and most other programs that can be used to cut long recordings into pieces also have many additional capabilities. I focused on the one Tomás asked about, but Audacity and other similar programs can be used to edit audio (and in some cases also video) recordings in many ways. They are something like Photoshop for audio. Just as most movie star photos are "Photoshopped" to remove even the most minor facial blemishes and to enhance desirable characteristics, nearly all commercial music recordings have been altered using audio editing techniques to fix every flaw and produce more-perfect results than even the best performers are able to produce in live performances. Just as most Hollywood actresses you might happen to meet in person probably won't seem as ultra-beautiful as in the "Photoshopped" photos promoting their movies, most music performers are not able to produce live music that matches the perfection of their altered recordings.

Of course, polished performances are not part of traditional flamenco. Correct every minor playing mistake, golpe that is slightly early or late, string buzz, outburst from the audience, or whatever, and the end-result won't be traditional flamenco.

-Bob

Hola Amigos

Thank you all and Bob thanks you for all the careful details you have explained.
I have installed Audacity on my PC but now I find that it will not import mp files, so these I need to convert to wav.

So my next technical question is does anyone know of a good converter of file types so that I can go ahead with Audacity.
My music files at present are on iTunes.

Many thanks

Tomás