I'm not a DJ, but I'd like to play one for a little while

August 5, 2008 12:40 PM

I'd like to overlay audio (spoken word) from a DVD which I own over the music of a CD, which I also own, to create a new CD. Is this doable? Is it doable for someone who has no idea how to start with a task like this?

A good friend of mine is getting married and as a joke for his bachelor party, I'd like to lay commentary from the 2004 World Series over a Social Distortion concert, and create a new CD to play during the party. Yes, there's a long story behind all this, which I'll spare all of you. I want it to be a "montage", where quotes from the broadcast come in, and the music gets a little quiet at those times.

I had seen some posts about Audacity, but I'm not sure if that can retrieve audio from both of my source formats. Is there an easy way to do this? Am I best off just finding a professional? I'd like to keep costs to a minimum if possible, but I'm ok putting in some sweat equity. Thanks!

posted by um_maverick to media & arts (7 comments total)

This can be done with audacity, fairly easily. Open both audio tracks (I'm assuming that they're both MP3, or something else that's common), and select-all+copy one, and paste it onto the other.

It'll start out sounding like total drek, but if you start playing with the levels, you'll eventually get it to where you want it.

If converting off of CD is what you want, you have a bunch of options. My favorite is Easy CDDA extractor (shareware), but there's a ton of options out there for converting, many of which are free.

Good luck!
posted by Citrus at 12:53 PM on August 5, 2008

You'll need a program to rip the audio from the DVD to a wav file (or something similar); you'll need a program to do the same with the CD. You'll then need a multitrack program (like Audacity) to edit and mix the two together as desired.
posted by anazgnos at 12:55 PM on August 5, 2008

anazgos has it. Rip both discs DVD to mp3 and import them into Audacity. Then play with the volume levels in both tracks so that the music goes quiet when you want (Google is your friend for how to do this, there's plenty of support out there). Then export it as mp3 or ogg from Audacity and import it into Windows Media Player or similar to burn it to a CD.

It's somewhat tedious but not too complex. Feel free to mefimail me if you want more detailed pointers.
posted by katrielalex at 1:09 PM on August 5, 2008

Rip both discs DVD to mp3

Well now...we don't know whether the audio on the DVD or CD is losslessly-sourced to begin with, but there's no reason to compress to a lossy format like mp3 for the purpose of this project if the end result is going to be a CD. Keep it lossless, in wav or aiff format.

You'll also need to pay attention to format of the audio on the DVD, as the CD will be at 16-bit 44.1 kHz, but the DVD has the potential to be higher, and if so, would need to be downsampled to 16/44 in order to be combined with the CD audio.
posted by anazgnos at 1:14 PM on August 5, 2008

"....would need to be downsampled to 16/44 in order to be combined with the CD audio"

Is that something that is done in Audacity? I haven't had a chance to play with it/read the documentation, so if it's all in there, please feel free to tell me to rtfm :)

Thanks!
posted by um_maverick at 1:24 PM on August 5, 2008

I haven't worked enough with Audacity enough to be sure, but I'm guessing it will do that for you. If not, the DVD audio ripper may handle that, depending which you use.
posted by anazgnos at 1:29 PM on August 5, 2008

This can be done with audacity, fairly easily. Open both audio tracks (I'm assuming that they're both MP3, or something else that's common), and select-all+copy one, and paste it onto the other.

I guess you could do that. The simplest way would be to open Audacity, then File->Import->Audio and import the first track, then repeat for the second track. You now have a two track project which you can edit and then export.
posted by ludwig_van at 6:00 PM on August 5, 2008