Looking for audio file "trimmer"

[jhart13]

Nothing bugs me more when listening to music than excessive silence left on the front or back of an mp3 file by who- and/or whatever ripped it (not meaning necessarily to impugn my wife, but.....). As a reformed radio guy, I have a burned in hatred for "dead DAP". I used to have a handy little applet that did allow me to hack off the blank space at either end without actually opening the file, thus doing losslessly what I could do brute-force in Audacity, but at the cost of resaving an already heavily compressed file. However, I lost the program in a hard drive crash last year and haven't been able to find it or even anything like it out there.

Can anyone help?

No, I don't remember the name. Sure wish I could.

[doniago]

My version of Jetaudio includes one, though you have to open each file individually to make edits...I use it to grab ringtones.

[jhart13]

I have it too, but the program says you need to pay extra for it to work. I find these things are fairly useless unless there's at least a rudimentary waveform display, so I know what I'm cutting. Just going by numbers on a clock is too imprecise.

Besides, I get the feeling that the jetAudio trimmer opens and resaves the files. That's what I'm trying to avoid.

I tried a free one today that was recommended. It cut the file 20 seconds shorter than the clock time indicated. There was no undo. Par for the course. Fortunately I was able to recover the original song file from my player.

Still looking.

[doniago]

There's no waveform indicator, but you can adjust the timing fairly precisely. At least for ringtone purposes I haven't had any problems.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'opens and resaves'....I mean, it will prompt you as to what filename you want to use, but since when I'm creating ringtones I specficailly _don't_ want to overwrite the original file, the prompts are a good thing for me.

[TedJ]

Have you tried mp3DirectCut (http://www.mpesch3.de1.cc/mp3dc.html)?

[jhart13]

<<Have you tried mp3DirectCut?>> I hadn't heard of that one but I'll take a look. It could be what I'm looking for. Thanks.

Just for those who don't know, when you open any kind of compressed file (and mp3s are heavily compressed) and resave it, you lose some fidelity. It's not as bad as making an analog copy of the material, but if you take your audio seriously, you will notice the difference.

That's why it's important when looking for a trimmer to find one that only modifies the definition data for the file (the header) rather than the file content itself. And why you don't want to use an editor like Audacity to do the job, either.

Update: Yep, mp3DirectCut is just what I want. Cuts front and back with no loss because it's just changing header info, not the file data. It has a waveform display for reference and it's free. Thanks for posting about it.

[mssx]

i use Nero Wave Edittor.i usually work with small files, so saving to PCM audio in a .wav container is not that bad (i think this whole process is lossless??) not really sure abt that but, this s/w is really good. u have to have the whole nero package though.