For my novice program, I did something kinda unorthodox, but it worked out GREAT.
I used Windows Movie Maker and cut up my music there. I would overlay the music and always fade out the clip so there wouldn't be some abrupt sound during the transition. I would overlay similar sounding parts of the music in order to have a nice transition. I took a 15 minute piece and cut it into 3 minutes, and you would never know any of the music was spliced together. Plus, I like that it's easy to take a whole section of music to move around, especially when overlapping with other music so you can keep listening until the edit sounds perfect.
After I save the video file, I simply go into a great program "Music Editor Free" and convert the video to MP3. From there, I'll use the editing program to make certain parts of the music louder or softer...It's so easy to do, and the finished product sounds great.
It might seem like an odd way to do it, but it worked out perfectly for me, and I have a great cut of music as the end-result. Might seem out to use the video editing software first, but the conversion to MP3 literally takes less than a minute. Plus, I'm very familiar with Windows Movie Maker, which helped, but honestly, it's pretty simple to use, so if any of you experiment, it'll catch on very quickly what you can do with it.