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The harpsichord is one of my favorite instruments. I love the tonality of the harpsichord sound and many of my favorite classical compositions feature the harpsichord as a primary instrument. I also happen to think LEGO blocks are among the greatest toys ever created. What does that have to do with the harpsichord? You would think nothing, but in this case, LEGO blocks are the harpsichord. That's right, following the documentation presented beyond that link, you could piece together your own LEGO harpsichord. Not feeling that ambitious? Read about the process of designing a LEGO harpsichord, then listen to the finished result. The blocks provide a rhythmic clicking you wouldn't get from other harpsichord building materials.

As someone who travels regularly, I'm always looking for creative ways to get better sound from my audio recordings. Hotel rooms tend to echo and you don't always have control over the environmental noises. I went looking for a solution that would offer a more controlled sound and ran across professional voice actor, Harlan Hogan's, Porta-Booth, which is built from some fairly common components. You don't have to travel to find this solution useful, it's also a great way to tighten up your sound when recording at home without needing a whole room dedicated to recording. Making a few slight modifications, I put together a video showing how I built my own.

Tony writes, "How can I convert some of my MP3s to WAV format? I have an old MP3 player that is supposed to support both MP3 and WAV files, but some of the new files I downloaded from AmazonMP3 don't seem to work with it. How can I convert these files to WAV to see if they will work?"

Your player likely has a problem with variable bitrate MP3s, which was a common issue with several of the early MP3 players. Fortunately, AmazonMP3 doesn't put any DRM on the files it sells, so converting them to WAV or any other format is a simple matter. The only downside is the WAV files will take up many times as much space as the MP3s, so you might not be able to fit as many files on your device.

To convert files from MP3 to WAV, start by downloading the freeware app WinFF. The app is simply to use and handles batch processing so you can convert all the files at the same time. Follow the steps below to convert MP3 files to WAV.

Converting MP3 to WAV with WinFF

1) After downloading and installing WinFF, launch the application and select the MP3 file or files you want to convert to WAV.
2) Choose the Wav for CD option from the Choose Format to Convert to... menu.
3) Pick a Destination folder to save your file(s).
4) Start Converting.

This tutorial should work for both Linux and Windows.

Download AC3Filter

With a large percentage of new camcorders using MPEG-2 video combined with AC3 audio as a common storage format, it's become much more complicated to work with camcorder video. If you have one of these camcorders and use free tools like Windows Movie Maker for video editing, you simply shouldn't be without the free DirectShow filter AC3Filter. The app runs in the background as an audio decoder and processor filter for AC3 and DTS audio tracks. AC3Filter supports playback of AC3 and DTS audio tracks in software like Windows Media Player, in addition to enabling editing features in things like Windows Movie Maker. Audio processing supports an up-mixing any audio source to 6 channels or down-mixing to stereo from surround sound. Both analog multi-channel and digital (SPDIF) output are supported. AC3Filter encodes any audio source to AC3 on-the-fly and send it over SPDIF to your receiver. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]

Brian writes, "I want to download just the music from YouTube. How do you separate the video from the music?"

There's no easy way to strip the audio out of a YouTube video while it's still on the Web. It's far easier to first download the video to your computer and then strip the audio once the video is on your computer. Since the new version of RealPlayer integrated video downloading the download process is remarkably easy. Once the video is downloaded, you then strip the audio and convert it to MP3, WMA or your favorite audio format.

"I like to sing karaoke at my house. How can I remove the vocals from my MP3s so I can make my own karaoke music?"

The best way to get great sounding karaoke music is to buy music that comes without vocals in the first place. If that's not an option, a number of tools help you remove vocals from MP3 files to make your own karaoke songs. None of them do this perfectly, because the whole premise of removing vocals is based on eliminating frequencies commonly found in the human vocal range from the file. Often these frequencies are also common to other instruments, so the sound of the entire song can sometimes get a little iffy. Here's a couple of my favorite ways to remove vocals from audio tracks.

Adam writes, "Is there a way I can manipulate the length of MP3 files, as I've been converting videos of live bands into MP3s but I'm getting the whole set as one file and Id rather have individual songs."

Virtually any audio editing app will allow you to chop up an MP3 file. The problem is, most of them also re-encode the file, which adds additional compression and often makes the file sound worse. There are a number of apps that support trimming MP3 files up into smaller segments. One of my favorites is mpTrim, which allows you to split MP3 files, without needing to re-encode the file. In some cases, you might need the pay version for trimming large files, but the free version works for many applications.

To trim a file with mpTrim, open the file you want to trim in the application and choose the mark in and mark out points.

When you're done, simply Save As and you'll have the new file with the original left unaffected.

One reason you might consider the pay version of the application is for batch processing, which allows you to make several changes and then apply them all at once.

Beverly writes, I need to record voice to CD, efficiently, and have the cd play in any normal CD player. I have an M-Audio Microtrack recorder with 1gb compact flash, but it seems that I have a high quality recording but it takes up a lot of space. In a work day I need to make 6 recordings. Does it make sense to consider a 30gb iPod to record voice to, and then burn to CD?

You don't mention how long your six recordings per day are, but if you want good quality sound for recording, don't use the iPod or any other portable media player. The Microtrack recorder is a good tool for what you are doing. If you want to use less space per file change your record settings. Under the Record Settings on the Menu make the following changes: Set Encoder to WAV. Set Sample Rate to 44.1. Set Bits to 16 (not 24). Using these settings, you will get about 90 minutes on a 1GB Compact Flash card and won't notice any quality difference. A much cheaper solution than buying an iPod would be to get several 1GB or 2GB compact flash cards and then swapping the card when it gets full. This also gives you the flexibility of using the Microtrack all day long. Keep in mind that an audio CD only holds as much as 74 minutes of audio, so a single 1GB card recording 90 minutes of voice audio is more audio than you can fit on a single audio CD.

Shannon writes, "I don't have a video iPod, but I was wondering if there was some program or anything that would help me strip the audio off of a video from YouTube and convert it so it will play on my iPod."

Without knowing exactly which iPod you have, there are two possibilities. Many of the newer iPods with no video support will playback the audio portion of an MP4 file without playing the video portion. If your iPod will support MP4 playback, the easiest thing to do is use one of the software apps for converting YouTube videos for iPod playback. If MP4 playback is not an option, taking video from YouTube and converting it to an audio file is relatively easy. You download the video file and then use file conversion software to go from the FLV format used for video on YouTube to an MP3 file playable on an iPod, Zune or any other portable media player. This second option requires a two step process. First download the video and then convert the file.

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. Below are step-by-step instructions for converting from WMA to WAV with WinFF.

Converting WMA to WAV with WinFF

1) After downloading and installing WinFF, launch the application and select the WMA file or files you want to convert to WAV.

2) Choose the Wav for CD option from the Choose Format to Convert to... menu.

3) Pick a Destination folder to save your file(s) and click Start Converting.

When the conversion finishes, you're ready to edit the WAV files in Audacity or any other audio editor.

This tutorial should work for both Linux and Windows.