Need an audio editor besides Audacity for making radio edits of EDM songs

[Rick540]

I got into electronic music a couple years back (listening not producing), and listen to it especially while I run/walk. Anyway, as I'm sure most of you know, a lot of EDM songs are 12" songs that many times run into the 6 minute range. That, and an "Original Mix" typically has several bars of kick/snare hits at the beginning and end to aid in seamless mixing for DJ's. Like most people, I often grow tired of a song after 3 or 4 minutes and often have to manually switch the song. Plus listening to 45 seconds to a minute of a plain-old four to the floor beat puts a kink in the cardio routine sometimes.

Anyhow, I've already made quite a few Radio/Short edit versions of the songs in my growing collection, and even though I've gotten pretty good at it and can usually do a song in a few minutes or less, I was wondering if there is anything out there better than Audacity which is what I've been using up until now.

Usually what I'll do when shortening a song is pretty much just slice the end and beginning off and apply a fade in and out that lasts for 4 or 8 measures. The first problem I have is that it's tedious to listen and count measures to find out where the good slice point is. Secondly, I'm looking to move beyond just chopping the ends off and maybe get into removing some in the middle where it's appropriate. So the way I see it, if I could find an audio editor that is somewhat simple like Audacity that can detect beats and slice the song at the beat points I'd have things much easier. Maybe there's a way to do this in Audacity and I'm just not aware of it. I've chopped up a couple tunes in the middle and really you can't tell they're chopped, but doing that is VERY tedious in Audacity. At least the way I do it is. It's basically listen, stop audio. slice, then start trimming and listening to the loop over and over until it's seamless. The way I see it, If I had a piece of software that could find the beat points and then chop at the beats, things would be a lot easier.

Again I know there's expensive software out there like Wavelab that can probably do this, but I'm not really looking to spend much, if any, money if I don't have to.

I hope all that makes sense. Thanks for any info anyone can share.

 

[localspace]

Why not just listen to mixes instead?? That's how it's meant to be played!
Or make your own mixes.. If you use something like Virtual DJ (it's free) you can make your own mixes.. it handles the beat matching and stuff for you. It's dead easy.
If you want to shorten a song, just place cue points and it can handle the mix automatically.

Chopping loops yourself.. there's software that can help, if you dial in the BPM, it can work out the bar structure automatically. It's pretty standard in most DAWs and audio editor. Audacity might be able to do it too.
But if you're just cutting the start and end it's probably faster do just do it by hand. If you zoom in on a waveform, it's usually pretty easy to make out where each bar starts and most dance music breaks down nicely in 2,4 or 8 bar segments. Just find the first kick, zoom in and cut right before the transient. But again, I think you'd have much more fun with some simple mixing techniques!