DVD and music help needed

I make DVD's with IDVD and IMovie on my Mac. I will soon be using 10.6.3 Snow Leopard. I love getting creative with the sound track and the movie track but I have had one issue that I haven't figured out yet. I want to be able to use a portion of a song to accompany certain movie clips or slide sets. As an example, I was in the Ice Hotel in Stockholm and the pictures of that would go well with the "Ice, Ice Baby" portion of that popular song from a few years ago. So far, with my skill, I have to use the whole song starting from the beginning and that just doesn't work right. How can I use just a portion of a song from my ITunes library? Can I do it with what I have? Do I need to have some special software? I could sure use some suggestions.

****

Audacity will let you clip and process audio


http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Thanks...giving it a look and a shot. Hope it works for me.

Wow...Audacity is very intimidating. I am not sure I can work with it. Looks very complicated. Anything easier around?

DIX22 said:

Wow...Audacity is very intimidating. I am not sure I can work with it. Looks very complicated. Anything easier around?

Click to expand...

That's as simple as they come, honestly, it's not complicated once you start playing around.
I actually prefer Audio Hijack Pro, but that may confuse you more.
Any others are way more complex.

Both iMovie and Garageband will let you clip audio to suit your needs.

Hi Chas....I have GarageBand v.4.1.2 but I have never used it. I am not totally proficient and didn't know what GB can do. Do you have any hints on how to used it to make a music clip from an existing song in my ITunes Library? Any pointers would help. That would be great if it works for me as Audacity seems pretty complex. Thanks. DC

BTW...I read your swtchers and newbies thing. Pretty good. You strongly advised using Time Machine. I do but I get aggrivated by the fact that I cannot set the time or the frequency of the Time Machine backup sessions. I don't need a backup more than once or twice a day but with TM I get it ever hour.

precision editor

I believe I've used precision editor.

First drag the song to your project. Then, click on the little gear within the song and open precision editor.

You'll see the entire song in a window represented as squiggly lines (technical term), and then you can cut out the portion of the song you want and drag it back to the project above.

Sorry I'm not more clear. I don't have the program in front of me.

But it's definitely possible in imovie and not complicated at all.

Maybe search "help" for song editing?

DIX22 said:

BTW...I read your swtchers and newbies thing. Pretty good. You strongly advised using Time Machine. I do but I get aggrivated by the fact that I cannot set the time or the frequency of the Time Machine backup sessions. I don't need a backup more than once or twice a day but with TM I get it ever hour.

Click to expand...

Download and install the free Time Machine Scheduler from here.

Also as an alternative, you can turn TM off from System Preferences and turn it on only when you want to backup. The problem with doing it that way is you may forget to make backups.