[Bill Baker]

 Greetings, when it comes to computers..... well, I just don't have the knowledge.

 Response Audio is representing a few more artist and before we can start offering their recordings, I want to be able to have some sample music available on my website. I am thinking 30-60 seconds from a few songs on each album.

 Can someone tell me the best way, or a few options, to go about this?

[Scott F.]

Hiya Bill,

Probably the easiest thing to do is rip those samples as MP3's. To save space and bandwidth I'd rip them at 32bps (You'll have an option of ripping all the way up to 320bps). This will keep the file size small. Pretty much everybody can listen to an MP3 file as they come with nearly every player out there.

After you rip them using an MP3 encoder, upload them to your file server in a separate subdirectory (so you can keep track of them) and provide a link. Then any person visiting your website can just click on the song title and it should pop open their favorite player.

As for the lower bit rate for the samples, you are just trying to give everybody a quick taste of the music to see if they like it. You could do it in a higher resolution but then you'll get nicked by your host if you exceed your bandwidth.

[jakepunk]

If you want an excerpt from the audio file, I would suggest using Audacity.  You can modify the .wav or .mp3 of your track to extract the thirty second portion you want to use.  Then apply "fade in" and "fade out" effects at the beginning and end of the sample, respectively, so that the sound isn't abruptly chopped off during playback.  Audacity is easy to use.  You just highlight the portion of the track you want to modify with the mouse and then use pull-down menus to apply effects.  You can then export the resulting file as an mp3.

Here is a screenshot of a thirty second A440 sine wave with the "fade in" and "fade out" effects.