Sound Editing

[canico]

Has anyone experience of using Serif Extra's Acoustica Standard Edition 6 music editing software ? It looks as though it would be useful but I would be pleased to hear any comments before investing.

Thank you 

Canico

[Barry Beckham]

The obvious question is. What is it you want to do that PicturesToExe cannot handle?

[canico]

Hello Barry

The write - up says it is easy to edit and mix and edit from different tracks and also do time stretching. I usually have a problem with the length of a music track, either too long or too short.

Canico

[Barry Beckham]

It will not do time stretching, but the sound options in PicturesToExe will meet your needs. 

Cut back and fade the track if it's too long, add another if it's too short

[MUR]

As PTE in not a sound editor, I use Audacity, to change picht, remove cliks, add reverberation, adjust tempo, auto duck, balance bass vs trebble and a lot of things.

MUR

[canico]

I have tried Audacity but found it too difficult to use so I am interested in something simpler.

Canico 

[Barry Beckham]

Canico

Stamp collecting?

Forgive my bluntness, but if you want to make anything of merit, you have to put some effort into it. Audacity is not a complicated program and it comes back to my first question. Making your slide show fit the music is a fundamental part of what we do. It sounds to me like you don't need an external sound editor at all. 

If your music is too long, click the end of the track in the time line and drag it back to where the images end, then fade it out

If your music is not long enough, either find another piece or use the same music twice and fade that out when you get to the end. Have a play around with the sound in PTE8 deluxe and you will soon get the hang of it

. 

[davegee]

Very often you want a piece of music to start and end as per the original recording.

In the PTE8 audio I use two instances of the same piece and do the fade in/out at an appropriate point somewhere in the middle of the piece.

That leaves the beginning and end intact and with care you can make the "join" seamless.

All done in PTE without the use of mirrors 

DG

[canico]

Thank you for the replies - I currently do as davegee says but was looking for a step up without the complexity  of Audacity or Audition. Perhaps  I will stick with what I have as it seems no-one in this community is using Serif.

Canico

 

[Xenofex2]

Carico,

Coming into this posting a bit late but would like to add a comment as feel some empathy with your initial posting – it could have been mine many years ago.

Concerning Serif’s promotion ‘it is easy to edit and mix’ I would suggest is the typical type of blub used to entice us mere mortals to buy something that we believe is better than what we already have. Although I do have a couple of Serif programs, many years back I purchased Magix’s ‘Audio Cleaning Lab’ (now upgraded to Audio & Music Lab Premium) and over the years, have slowly picked up hints and tips and when I think back to my early days with the program, although no-way an expert, am certainly able to do loads more now than I ever could. But that could be the same with P2E or any of my programs. So just practice, sorry, there is no easy route.

An alternative suggestion for your ‘stretching’ question, I recently was putting together a family a/v of our two grand-daughters having fun at an amusement park. The background music was ‘girls like to have fun’ but this ended a few seconds before the visuals. My solution was to cut out and paste back in a chorus of the song and then a fade at the end. It worked. You can’t really notice ‘the join’ and certainly would not have been able to do that years ago.

George  

[canico]

Hello George

Thank you for your comments 

Canico

[ally_bally_bee]

Hi Canico,

First I should say I am a complete newbie in P2E world and know literally nothing about its audio features! However I have Acoustica 6 the premium version. The time stretching seems to be very high quality. I've just stretched 10CC's Reds in my Bed from 4:08 to 5:08 and the quality is pretty good. A few things to bear in mind - 

Time stretching in Acoustica costs money - looking at the website you would need the standard edition - which is under 20 quid.

However you can try it for free - https://acondigital.com/products/acoustica-audio-editor/

Time stretching is an exact science - you enter the duration you want in a dialog box and it will stretch the audio to exactly that duration.

Time stretching doesn't alter the pitch (which is clever) but does slow the song down - the tempo will change. This may not be what you want...

Time stretching has its limits - above a certain amount will sound ridiculous and the more you stretch the more likely you are to have 'artifacts' that you might be able to hear. So 10 percent will be fine but don't plan on 200%.

Acoustica like any decent audio editor will also allow you to extend your audio using loops - this is trickier as you will have to learn to select loop points but doesn't change the tempo - it does rely on your music have 'loopable' sections.

And you can copy and paste - copy the chorus and then paste it in accurately and you can extend the length of a song.

ally