Shortening a Piece of music to make a "clip"

Hah, the amount of time I've had that worry making trail length edits of music... The worst was Queen, so many key changes...

I think my record was editing a five minute track to a 30 second trail version.

By the way, might be worth making full versions for the more reputable companies, I know at my old place they'd sit down and listen through the whole track because, obviously, start middle and end can be totally different.

I'm not sure 60 second cuts would get much of a look-in during the chats about music policy...

You'll probably find many will ask for a full CD to listen to anyway as I don't think many (if any) stations would confirm airplay with a short sample.

Course, there's also the fact no station worth its listeners would end up spreading the tracks, might end up in the CD collection of an employee but not widely disseminated.

Hi AJ,

I was just wondering how I could cut the tracks down (directly on the computer), but I have actually thought of a solution now.

Let me know what you think.

I have a CD to CD recorder in the house and I am going to simply cut the tracks by burning a new CD with the right-sized clips and then get the computer to read these directly off the edited CD.

I'm sure there is a better way of doing this, but time is the enemy at the moment!

I intend to set up a sort of press release page and write round directly to radio stations who broadcast classical/jazz to see if they'd like to receive a complimentary CD (based on what they've heard of the clips).