Audio Editting

Audacity is an open source software used widely for audio editing.
Audacity use the LAME MP3 encoder to convert audio files into MP3 format.

See "Where Do You Create and Share Your Audio Files and Remixes?" at youtube for relevant suggestions.

The following are my current steps from collecting raw recording to compile into audio and video:

1) Digital voice recorder is first used to record the sound into wav format. The raw file is rather dry. This can be seen from the "ocean mist" wave shape when played in windows media player: one only sees some very small individual mist peaks, instead of the normal wide and abundant mist.

2) Open this raw file in Audacity and export it into MP3 or WAV format. Then the wave shape becomes normal. Audacity has the function to remove white noise, but trying it doesn't show that the effect was actually good due to sound distortion, so I gave up.

3) After this, windows movie maker can be used to incorporate the audio into a video, which can then be uploaded to youtube. In this step, one should use the audio file exported from Audacity. Using the raw file would result in plenty of noise, and sound quality totally screwed.

However, it should be noted that seems the automatic "processing" function of youtube would trim the video to remove silent ending. This leads to the loss of the last chord in the second version above, which appears in the end after a while of silence. That's bad. The solution is to add some variation to the end. Since the sound cannot be changed, an end title page can be added (change font color to be the same as background, so words won't show).