misterz

There are plenty of programs out there and you don't have to be stuck with whatever software came with your soundcard/system...I've never gotten a good audio editor with any sound card I've bought (unless you count something I got in 1986...but THAT didn't even do everything it was supposed to).If you're looking to do it on the cheap, try finding a shareware version of CoolEdit. The last I looked, I was running a copy of CoolEdit96 and it had all the functionality I needed for a few years...but the shareware version limits what you can do in each "session". You'll have to do your editing in .wav format. To convert from .mp3 to .wav I've used MADPLAY with good results. The frontend contains the code and the whole package is freeware (do a search on MADPLAY or MAD Frontend). If you want to get deeper into editing the audio, Sound Forge from Sonic Foundry is pretty powerful. Open the "it's too big" file, cut/copy half of it into a new file and you're there. Once you get the hang of it, you can have a lot of fun. Both editing programs can twist samples nine ways to Sunday AND if you're in the habit of extracting digital audio from CD's and you'd rather have a fade out than an abrupt halt - you can do that too. Got a thirst for playng something in reverse and you don't have a turntable?

I've been playing with it for a while an it's REAL simple to throw things together...just paint the sample/loop/wav into the timeline and move on to the next. I run other software from Sonic Foundry for Video and audio editing and recording and have been pretty impressed with the output. I have a friend who introduced me to Fruityloops and if someone had the time to monkey around with Acid and Fruityloops (which I don't), you could get real creative. If you're looking to experiment, I'd suggest going for one of the stripped-down versions of Acid because most of the functionality is still there...plus they had an offer recently where if you bought a boxed version of one product, they'd send you another product free. A good deal, really.