Music Editing Software (Free)

Dirk Diggler · 19 Apr 2020 at 13:53

What's the best free software for Windows that would allow me to take a number of MP3 files and create a single file with snippets of the originals?

Basically a cut and stitch type editor. Does such a thing exist for free?

Armageus · 19 Apr 2020 at 13:54

Audacity maybe?

Deleted member 77746 · 19 Apr 2020 at 14:09

Armageus said:
Audacity maybe?

ai

Dirk Diggler · 19 Apr 2020 at 15:27

Absolutely perfect, thanks.

Dirk Diggler · 29 Apr 2020 at 13:11

Is there anything similar I could use to get and edit video from Youtube?

Hades · 1 May 2020 at 09:26

There are quite a few free youtube downloaders. I don't use one but just googling for them brings up a lot.

As for video editors there are again many free ones. Three that come to mind are:

DaVinci Resolve - A really top notch commercial editor which also has a free version.
KDEnlive and Openshot - Two really good open source editors.

Dirk Diggler · 1 May 2020 at 09:31

Thanks, I'm now using:

4k Video Downloader - Getting video from YT
Handbrake - managing video files
MKVToolNix - managing/merging video files (including striping audio separately)
Audacity - managing music files

CaptainCrash · 1 May 2020 at 16:15

Do bear in mind that Audacity converts MP3 files to uncompressed PCM for editing purposes before re-encoding back to MP3, therefore the output will be lower quality than the original due to lossy>lossy encoding. This may or may not be an issue in practice depending on your use case.

If you want to avoid this you could try something like mp3DirectCut, although it's pretty limited in its feature set compared to Audacity.

robfosters · 1 May 2020 at 18:16

What about cakewalk? That’s a great DAW for free.

Dirk Diggler · 1 May 2020 at 19:08

Thanks, Rob. I'll get a look at that.