As you build up a music collection on your PC it can be difficult to keep the stack of files under control. Here's how to restore some order.
Personal computers have transformed into home entertainment centres, and your hard disk may now hold more music than the average jukebox. As with so many things in life, if your music collection is kept in order, you’ll find things much easier to manage. This doesn’t just mean storing MP3s in suitably named folders, there are plenty of other aspects to consider, such as identification tags, normalisation of volume levels and much more.
Over the next two issues we’re going to take a look at how you can keep your music collection shipshape. In this issue we’ll look at how to edit the music files themselves. In a fortnight, we’ll examine the tools that can help you organise your entire collection.
Many audio tracks, particularly self-recorded tracks, include a period of silence towards the beginning or end. Others, especially music ripped from CDs with so-called ‘hidden’ tracks may have silence in the middle. This is not only a waste of space, but also interrupts the flow of a playlist. Thankfully, this is easily fixed using the free audio editor Audacity.
Pay a visit to the Audacity website (http://audacity.sourceforge.net) and download and install the software. While you’re at the website, also download the LAME MP3 encoder, as this will enable the program to save files in the MP3 format. Launch the program and click the File menu before selecting Open and indicating which audio file you’d like to edit. In the main program window you’ll see a graphical representation of the selected track.
Use the Zoom In toolbar button – a magnifying glass with a plus sign in it – to enlarge the graphic and look for flat, silent sections at the beginning or end of the track. You may want to use the playback controls at the top of the screen to make sure that sections really are silent before using the mouse to highlight the area you would like to remove and click Edit then Delete.
Click the File menu, select Export As MP3, choose where the file should be stored and click Save. You will now need to indicate the location of the LAME encoder you have downloaded. Click Yes and navigate to the lame_enc.dll before clicking Open. You can then repeat this process for any other files that contain unwanted silence. For tracks that feature two songs with a chunk of silence in the middle, save the file twice and remove the first song and silence from one, then the second song and silence from the other.
Next - Section 2: ID3 tags
