Want easy way to snip out parts of mp3's

[Riverwolf]

I have started to record my play/practice sessions with a Zoom Hn1.
It is kinda a pain in the butt to start stop so I end up with 10-30 min mp3's.
All I want is to be able to snip out a piece or a song while leaving the original mp3 intact.
I have Audacity 2.0.4 installed but have never understood how to do anything in it.
If this program will do this then I will learn how.
Or is there a better simpler program to use?
Thanks!

[Fran Guidry]

Audacity should do a fine job.

Open Audacity.
Open the folder where you store your clips
(I never work off the SD card, I always transfer the files to hard disk first)
Drag and drop the clip onto Audacity
Drag the cursor across the section you want
File Export Selected Audio
repeat as necessary

Fran

[Riverwolf]

Thanks I will try that. When you say to drag over the file to select the part? Will it play it so you know where to snip?
I will I had a Audacity for Dummies book!

[Fran Guidry]

The Audacity site has a lot of good info. http://audacityteam.org/help/

My fresh install of Audacity is in "Quick Play" mode so when I click into the time bar Audacity starts playing at that point and leaves a marker behind. So it's very easy to find sections, select them, and export them.

Fran

[ac]

Depending on your purpose, if you want to trim or edit mp3 files without quality loss, then something like Mp3 Trimmer or Magic Cutter (for Mac's) or likely a couple dozen similar alternatives for PC.

You can change the gain, find silences automatically, add various types of fade in fade outs, etc--without altering the original quality.

These two editors each cost about $10--so not free--but lifetime upgrades. Magic Cutter does aac also but I've stuck to mp3 so use Mp3 Trimmer. Nice dedicated audio tools if you have more than the occasional mp3.

Audacity works fine too but you are converting mp3 to wav, editing, and then re-encoding to mp3 or other. It's not lossless--but likely you won't hear any real difference if your mp3 source is pretty high quality. So depends on you purpose/needs.

[rrgguitarman]

Originally Posted by ac

Depending on your purpose, if you want to trim or edit mp3 files without quality loss, then something like Mp3 Trimmer or Magic Cutter (for Mac's) or likely a couple dozen similar alternatives for PC.

You can change the gain, find silences automatically, add various types of fade in fade outs, etc--without altering the original quality.

These two editors each cost about $10--so not free--but lifetime upgrades. Magic Cutter does aac also but I've stuck to mp3 so use Mp3 Trimmer. Nice dedicated audio tools if you have more than the occasional mp3.

Audacity works fine too but you are converting mp3 to wav, editing, and then re-encoding to mp3 or other. It's not lossless--but likely you won't hear any real difference if your mp3 source is pretty high quality. So depends on you purpose/needs.

http://deepniner.net/mp3trimmer/index.html


Does mp3 trimmer work on windows? it appears that it does not?
Thanks.

[mercosound]

You may want to consider using the .wav format for your original recordings. It's my understanding that when you open an MP3 file in an editing program, edit it, and then save the result as an MP3 file, it goes thru the MP3 compression algorithm once again, with the associated loss of quality. Of course, depending on the rest of the system (particularly the monitors), you may never hear this. With the memory capacity of most devices these days, it seems to make sense to record/edit in the .wav format, and then convert the edited file to an MP3, thus subjecting the file to a single pass thru the MP3 compression algorithm. As an aside, I'm happy with the sound quality of 48K, 24 bit .wav files, and they're not so large to present a storage problem.