My experiments with music files: You can do this too!

I would like to share an experience I had today with some audio editing. I happened to watch a part of a movie file and ran through it because the cast had an actor I hold in high esteem. However, the  movie itself wasn't anything to talk about, and I skimmed through the part in under 10 minutes and make that out. But as it happens, at times, while rummaging through useless material, you chance into gems. The same happened here. I heard a few lines of an excellent song and developed a liking for it immediately. The song is sung by one of the superbly talented singers who has become my favourite, off late. It has some wonderful tabla playing in the background, with melodious flute and piano compositions.

Next I searched the sites I use regularly for listening to my fav songs for this song. I checked out fmw11.com and similar sites, and it wasn't there. Then I tried the online repositories like dishant.com to see if I could just enjoy it on online streaming. Unsuccessful, I tried a wild Google search, followed by a youtube search. To my chagrin, the song wasn't anywhere. Not much of a surprise, as the movie was such a low profile caper, with almost nothing good to talk about.

Now, I couldn't just let the song be lost. I would probably forget about it in a few days if I didn't act immediately, and I didn't really want to. I also wanted to share it with others who share my taste of music. This paved way for some audio engineering work that I experimented with. I came out with the prototype result that you can listen to, in the attached file. 
 
How did I get this file? To start with, I searched for, and found out a free software called "AoA Audio Extractor" that could rip apart the audio from composite video. I downloaded and installed it on Windows Vista, without any problems.
 
Initial experiments with the software gave me great results and I understood its use perfectly, without problems. I could select portions of the video file and extract audio out of it. However, there were quite a few problems with the target song. The song was in three different parts in three different places in the movie file, with some overlapping music and lines. To add to the complexity, these song portions were recorded with different sound levels, and had voices in the background.
 
Using the Extractor software, I ripped off the three audio files corresponding to the song as three mp3s. Next, I switched to "Audacity", another freeware, a sound editor that I have been using to create my cellphone ringtones for some time now. I opened the three mp3 files in separate Audacity windows. 
 
To start with, I trimmed the ends of these files to exclude the sound extraneous to the song itself. Once done, I picked up the file with the highest level of audio amplitude and decided to use its level as a base or common level. Then I edited up the other two files, one by one, and amplified their sound levels by trial and error to an approximate level of the base file. Once I was convinced that the sound levels of all three files were almost same, I selected all contents of file 2 in the sequence, and copy-pasted them at the end of file 1. Then I did the same with the third file in the sequence and copy-pasted its contents at the end of the composite file containing contents from files 1 and 2. Finally, I had to listen for and trim off redundant, useless and duplicate parts at the joints. Once I was done, I exported the final, composite file as a single mp3 file, and I was done. The work wasn't really perfect, but, not bad either, considering that it was the first time I did anything like this.
 
I could not suppress or chop off some dialogues which were superimposed on the music because of the limitations of Audacity. Further, I think I can work on the file more and improve the audio quality; this is just version 1.0 of my work, you can say. I plan to experiment with some advanced software like Cakewalk or Goldwave and find out how that can be done. All in some good time. At the same time, I also wish that the song doesn't go unheard, and gets its praise due.
 

[PS: The sound quality that I finally received is far superior to what you get to listen with the above video file. I had to cut down on the video file size for its use on the blog and consequently compromise on the audio quality for this.]