Salted password with AES encryption I am encrypting a text file using AES 256 encryption. Does it add much to the security of the file’s contents to also add a salted password to the file? (I don’t believe it would add much) Can a salted password be added as part of the encryption process to make the encryption itself more secure? ( I don’t believe so - my understanding is that salting only makes the password more difficult to determine, not the encryption )
Passwords are not keys. Keys consist of a specific number of randomized bits. So to encrypt a file using a password (password based encryption or PBE) you first need to create a key from a password.

Password hashes or Password Based Key Derivation Functions are the schemes that consume a password, a salt, a work factor (or iteration count) and possibly other parameters (parallelism, memory usage) and then produce a key. Known PBKDFs are PBKDF2, bcrypt, scrypt and Argon2.

The salt is mainly used for two reasons: making sure that duplicate passwords do not derive the same key and avoiding rainbow table attacks. Producing the same key is not a big issue during encryption; you can use an IV to create a different ciphertext. Rainbow table attacks are more problematic: you can create a table with keys derived from passwords and try and decrypt: this would allow an attacker to test keys without minding the work factor.

As you can also derive an IV with a PBKDF you might as well use a salt. This would make PBE indeed more secure for the reasons stated above. So yes, you should use an up to date PBKDF such as Argon2, a strong password, a large work factor and - indeed - a salt during encryption.