Wavepad MP3 Editor

If you're looking for an MP3 editor, try Wavepad.

Wavepad is one of the best sound editing software I've ever used.

It comes with a free version which can handle your short (i.e., less than 40 seconds) audio requirements. It does a good job of saving your WAV files as MP3 files and vice-versa, and sound distortion is minimized (even on "slow" computers).

Audacity tends to distort mixed MP3s, so I just use it to pre-mix various sound sources using "envelopes". This is done when you have a voice-over announcement blended with music that fades in and out.

For example, at the start you can have intro music fade in (so that people are not jolted too much), and then slowly soften in volume (not completely fade out) during the voice-over. This "music in the background" is sometimes called ambient music. Then as the voice-over comes to an end, your ambient music slowly increases in volume (outro), which then completely fades out (if you wish).

That's what envelopes do. You can, with Audacity, visually adjust the volume of the music portion as well as the voice portion. However, in my case, when Audacity mixes the voice and music, the final mp3 file sounds distorted.

It's like I'm shaking badly from a terrible cold.

Anyway, I don't do a final mix in Audacity. I use Audacity to save each track as a separate wav file (one for the voice, another for the music).

I use Wavepad for the final mix. With Wavepad, I can then save the final mix as better sounding wav or mp3 files. While the resulting mp3 file is quite small (265KB versus the 2,907KB wav file), you can further shrink it (from 265KB down to only 67KB!) with MP3Tweak.com

MP3Tweak converts your wav or mp3 files into smaller files, so that people who connect to the internet using dial-up modems won't have to wait too long to hear you.

Here's a sample --

If you don't have Flash, just click on this link: isdlite.mp3 (67KB)
[ First posted on 09/09/2004 by Manuel Viloria ]