Add 2 Audio Tracks to Windows Movie Maker

"Is there a way to add two audio clips to a Windows Movie Maker video which overlap each other?"

Windows Movie Maker only supports two audio tracks: the audio track recorded with the video is one of the tracks; the other movie maker audio track is the Audio/Music track. In your case you need an additional audio track, so that you can layer your two audio files on top of each other. If you plan to do this regularly , the easiest thing to do is graduate to a more complete video editing suite, like Pinnacle Studio, Roxio Easy Media Creator, or Sony Vegas. If you're on a tight budget or you'll only do this one time, you can combine the two tracks in another application, save out a single audio file, and import the combined audio file into Windows Movie Maker.

Convert WMA to WAV

Tony writes, "Part of [my] podcast will involve material I record on an Olympus Digital Voice Recorder WS-100. It transfers the files to the PC via USB connection. However, when I tried to open the file with Audacity, it says the file is a Window Media file and need to convert it."

The Olympus WS-100 is definitely a convenient tool for voice recording applications. Before I get into how to convert Windows Media WMA files to WAV files you can edit with Audacity, let me offer an important tip: if you plan to edit the audio recorded with the WS-100, make sure you record in the HQ mode. The lower quality modes apply extra compression which is great for saving space, but your audio won't sound good if you recompress to something like MP3 later.

To convert files from WMA to WAV, the easy (although somewhat ugly) solution is WinFF. The app uses file conversion support from FFmpeg to convert between many different audio and video formats. Read on for step-by-step instructions for converting from WMA to WAV with WinFF.

Make a Repeating Audio Loop in Audacity

Mike asks, "I have a 7 second heartbeat audio track. I want to make it a 5 minute track. What is it called and how do I do it?"

What you're describing here is what's commonly referred to a looping an audio track. This is frequently done with a section of audio that's either repeated for a few times throughout a musical composition or a loop might be used to create a bed for an entire segment of music. The actual implementation varies slightly depending on which audio application is used, but the basic premise is the same - you figure out how long the piece of audio you want to loop is (7 seconds in this case) and then you establish how many times you need to play a 7 second file to achieve 5 minutes of continuous playback. I'll walk through the process of creating a 5 minute loop from a 7 second track using Audacity, which works for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Changing Audio Sample Rate in Audacity

How do I combine two audio files with different sample rates in Audacity? I get voice mail files that come in at 8000 Hz, some recordings with my portable recorder at 16,000 Hz and my music files tend to be 44,100 Hz. When I play the tracks in Audacity, the lower sample rate files play to fast and sound weird. How do I fix this?

Sample Rate is important to audio files for two reasons. Sample Rate is the number of times per second you capture a snapshot of audio information during recording. Higher sample rates result in great audio detail, the same way you get smoother motion in video by capturing more frames per second. On playback, it's necessary to know the sample rate for compatibility with output specifications.

Audacity assumes everything in your project is the sample rate of the first file in your project. So if the first audio file in your project is an 8000 Hz file, the rest of the files are played as if they were 8000 Hz files also. Even though the Audacity track details show the original sample rate of a file, the software automatically matches the sample rate to the project sample rate during the import process. What you describe sounds like you changed the rate of an 8000 Hz file in a 44100 Hz project using the track Set Rate feature. This is easily fixed and you can get matching sample rates across files in a few simple steps.