OK, I’ve only very recently gotten into the world of MP3 and ripping CDs and I know very little about them.
I’m doing a report on a Japanese Dialect and would like to include some sound files in a Power Point presentation. I have a CD with several tracks featuring a character speaking in this dialect. I don’t need the whole track, only a short 15 to 30 second segment.
Are there programs out there that let you edit MP3 files? Can anyone suggest a program? Something free or available on a trail basis would be very cool…
A program out there called Audacity should be all you need. MP3s are highly compressed, so they can’t be edited. Any program that says it can edit mp3s is implicitly decompressing them into .wavs and editing those, then recompressing back into mp3. So the short of it is, you gotta decompress to .wav, edit, then recompress. Audacity will do all of that, and it’s not too hard to use.
Actually, there are a lot of MP3 cutters out there that do not decode/re-encode. E.g., mp3trim.
The best plan is to save the original as a wav file (never putting it into an mp3 in the first place), cut that (MS OSes come with basic sound editors but you should really use a good program), then encode into mp3.
I also recommend Audacity, but I could never get the MP3 conversion plugin to work, so for a long time I used RightClick-MP3 or dbEditAMP to convert MP3 to WAV, then Audacity to edit the wav. That was before I got Cakewalk, which can edit MP3s directly.
You can find oodles of freeware, shareware, and demos that might serve your purposes. Search for “free audio editor”.
Lame is a good program for encoding/decoding, the ‘audiophiles’ that actually listen to mp3s swear by it. Audiophile in quotes since most audiophiles shun mp3s like the plague.
