Recording and Editing Music With GoldWave

GoldWave Digital Audio Editor

GoldWave is the an advanced and complete audio editor for Windows personal computers. Comprehensive and easy to use, it allows you to record any sounds going through your soundcard. Once recorded, you have extreme flexibility and power for editing, cutting and modifying the recordings. GoldWave includes includes common audio editing commands and effects, including audio restoration filters (in case you are using this to make digitized versions of your old LPs and tapes). It also has a batch processor/converter, so you can record during the day and let GoldWave do the conversions while you sleep.

GoldWave is available from GoldWave.com. Since there is an evaluation version of GoldWave (it expires, based on time or on number of activities), you should try the evaluation version before purchasing.

Recording and Editing Music

The first step when using GoldWave is to create define the amount of time you wish to record. Then, recording is as simple as clicking on the red triangle in the VCR-type controls. Depending on your settings, GoldWave will continue to record past the end of your time block, or it will stop at that point. You can also stop the recording manually by clicking on the VCR-type "stop" button (a button with a solid box in it).

Once you have recorded the audio, you immediately save it in any of the formats. I suggest doing that before starting any form of editing. You should save in the .wav format, since that format retains all the recorded data -- formats such as MP3 actually do compression of the audio data in a manner that loses some of the "information."

Once you have saved the file as wav, then you can save it again as an MP3 file or in whatever format you desire. The conversion process will take a while -- go have a cup of coffee.

Alternatively, this is your time to cut out the silence or talking at the beginning and end. You can also use any of the audio restoration filters to remove pops & clicks, remove "hiss," other changes. If you are going to mix several audio cuts together -- cut and paste or just as multiple songs together on a CD -- you can use GoldWave's editor to increase or reduce the volume of sections of the recordings.

Converting Music into other Formats!

GoldWave can convert to and from a number of different formats, including:

• wav
• wma
• mp3
• ogg
• aiff
• au
• vox
• raw binary data

 

Copyright © 2005 Terry A. Stockdale. All rights reserved.