Music editing can be a complicated and elaborate business. However, there are several aspects of music editing which do not require an expert training. While there are several commercial music editors in the market, if you are not looking for stuff too fancy, you can rely on Audacity – a free open-source music editing software. You can download it from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/

What do you get from Audacity – the free music editing software?

You can work on audio and stereo tracks for -

Music Editing

• Cut, Copy, Paste, and Delete tracks or portions of tracks.
• Unlimited Undo and Redo
• Editing and mixing of an unlimited number of tracks.
• Zooming in to edit individual sample points.

Adding Effects

• Noise reduction
• Time Shifting
• Changing speed, pitch or tempo
• Filtering using equalizer or FFT
• Employing pre-built effects (eg amplify, fade-in, fade-out, echo)

please note that some menu options are not available when you are playing a track. Click the 'STOP' button before using the effects.

Import and Export Audio Files

• It can import and export wav, mp3, aiff and ogg vorbis. However for mp3 support, you need to download LAME mp3 encoder
  

Recording

• You can record music from the appropriate hardware (microphone, line-in, CD-player, sound card). If you can listen to a music in your computer, you can record it too. Use ‘Wave Out Mix’ as your source if you want to record what you are listening to.

It has brilliant sound quality for both recorded and edited/exported music files. You can further control the quality by altering the bit formats and sampling rates. For the more tech-savvy people, it supports third party plug-ins and you can write your own. And yes, it comes for Windows, Mac OS and Linux/Unix. You can download it from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/

How to upload/download audio/video from iPod to any computer without using iTunes?

Have you ever felt limited by iTunes? If yes, then this is for you. Personally, the main reason I wanted to get rid of iTunes, is its binding to one computer. If you want to upload or download audio/video from any computer using simple drag-and-drop, if you want have more flexibility with your multimedia file sharing then Floola is the way to go. It also has two versions - windows and mac, you can load both of them on your ipod and can access both windows and mac systems. What's more? It's completely FREE. Here is how you get started with this wonderful software -

1. Download the software from Floola download page. Select the operating system of your choice.
2. If you freshly formatted or restored your iPod, you'll need to run iTunes once and copy at least one song. (I know this is bit of an irony. But you have to do it anyway.)
   
3. Unzip the downloaded file and run the executable file.
4. Floola might ask you to set up the iPod automatically. It will be easier that way. If you want set up your ipod manually or have other installation issues, follow the floola installation guide.
5. Copy the executable file to your iPod. Now you can run the software in any computer that you connect your iPod to. That is where it's flexibility lies.
6. Run the software if it's not already running. Click Item -> Add... as shown below to open the 'add to iPod' dialouge box


7. Drag files or folder in this box and click 'Add'. Files will be uploaded to your iPod.
8. You can use Floola to change properties of the files, delete them or even play them.
9. Close Floola and eject iPod before you disconnect the gadget.
10. Next time you connect it to any computer, just run the executable floola file in the iPod that you had earlier copied into it. For PC/Mac run the appropriate PC/Mac executable version.
    

Hereby your iPod is declared free from the shackles of iTunes and a single computer.

How do I extract audio from a youtube video i.e. how do I convert downloaded youtube video (.flv) to a .mp3 file?

Now that you have the youtube video downloaded into your system, you might want to extract the audio from it. If you don't know how to download a youtube video, check my previous post on 'how to download youtube videos'. Assuming you have downloaded the video, here are the steps to extract the audio from it.

1. Go to Free Studio Manager website. Choose any of the listed softwares to download. Yes, for now, download any of them as marked on the snapshot below.
2. On the next page, click the 'Download now' button.
3. Save the file and install it.
4. Once installed, open the Free Studio Manager from your start menu. Start-> All Programs -> DVDVideoSoft -> Free Studio Manager
5. It opens the studio manager with which you can use several softwares. For today's purpose, click on the 'YouTube' tab as shown in the red circle below. Then in the list, click on 'Extract audio from YouTube video' as in the blue circle.
6. The softwares which you don't have are in regular text whereas those you have are in bold. If you don't have the software installed already, it will ask for download and install. Go ahead and install the software.
7. Once installed, the name will appear in bold. Click it again. Choose 'continue' to run the software. It opens a dialouge box where you specify your youtube .flv file as input and the .mp3 file as output. You can choose the quality of the output file also. The default value of 'optimal quality' works pretty good.

... So there you have your mp3 file extracted from the youtube video.

Notes -
1> As you have noticed already, the free studio manager has a bunch of different softwares which you might wanna use.
2> For the mp3 extraction, you can also specify the url of the youtube video. However it might be slow and sometimes there are problems with the conversion.

How do I copy/download youtube videos/audios to my own computer with just one click?

Youtube is a great service, no doubt. However you might want more. What if you want those video/audio on your own system? The reasons may be several. You want to access them while offline, or may be your internet connection is slow and the videos don't load smoothly, or you just want your fav things in a single folder. Whatever the reason, here is how you do it.

1> You can use an online service on http://vixy.net/. You can type in the url of the youtube video and download a file of your specified type (avi, mp3, mp4 etc). However due to excess load, the server is often busy. And even when it does covert the file, sometimes the quality is not as good.

2> The other option, which I recommend, is use an add-on of mozilla firefox. Here is a step-by-step guide. Steps 1-4 are one-time. Once set, you can save videos with just one click.

1. If you do not already have Mozilla Firefox. Download and install it from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
   
2. Install the add-on named 'Fast Video Download' from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3590
3. Once installed you have to close and restart the mozilla browser. Before you do that, make sure you have the url of this page in the history or otherwise saved to come back to this post.
4. After the installation, you will see icon at the bottom right corner of the browser as shown below.
5. Now go to the video which you want to download. And click this icon. It will ask for the file name and location to save like a normal windows dialogue box. Fill the info and hit 'save'.
6. The file will be saved in .flv format which is a flash format. You can open the downloaded file in an .flv player from http://www.download.com/FLV-Player/3000-2139_4-10467081.html
7. Often you would like to convert the file to other formats eg avi, if you want to retain the video or to mp3, if you want to extract just the audio. This can be easily done too with other free softwares. Read my other post on how to extract audio (mp3) from youtube video.
   

A few notes -
1> If you click the video download icon on a page which does not have an embedded video, you will get an error saying "can't handle this page". Recheck the page you are on and browse to the proper page before hitting the button again.

2> It can used to download videos from other sites too eg video.google.com, metacafe.com, hi5.com, vids.myspace.com, break.com, current.com, dailymotion.com, putfile.com, Streetfire.net, vidiac.com