MP3 editor

[angusfaldo]

Can anyone recommend a good MP3 editor? I've MP3 files of whole albums I want to break down into songs but I'm not sure where to start. Something that would make editing track names easy too would be a bonus!

Thanks people

AF

[meeja]

Cool Edit Pro

Soundforge

Are the dogs danglies for this kind of thing.

Problem is, they are not cheap to buy officially *cough*

[Plotloss]

Convert it into a wav and then use Windows Sound Editor is the cheapest official way.

Soundforge is the best way though...

[chrisjl]

Using any of the above will degrade the sound quality (although not necesarily by a noticable amount). Due to the nature of mp3, every conversion loses some more information - like copying VHS to VHS.

http://mp3splt.sourceforge.net/ will slice the original file up without going through the decode/encode cycle.
It's command line only though, but will produce the best results.

[barry sheene]

I use Cool MP3 Splitter.

It rocks and it's free

www.yaosoft.com/

[Bodo]

Another cool free open-source audio editor:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

[meeja]

chrisjl said:

Using any of the above will degrade the sound quality (although not necesarily by a noticable amount). Due to the nature of mp3, every conversion loses some more information - like copying VHS to VHS. http://mp3splt.sourceforge.net/ will slice the original file up without going through the decode/encode cycle. It's command line only though, but will produce the best results.

Both Soundforge and Cool Edit Pro will allow recording at up to 48kHz 16bit stereo WAV files.... ie no quality loss.

Once you've recorded them onto PC, you could burn them to CD's as WAVs, and the quality will be identical to that of the original record, or you can compress them to MP3, when (as Chrisjl correctly points out) there will be a very slight quality degredation.

[chrisjl]

meeja said:

Both Soundforge and Cool Edit Pro will allow recording at up to 48kHz 16bit stereo WAV files.... ie no quality loss.

CDs are 44.1kHz so recording at a higher rate doesn't achieve anything.

meeja said:

Once you've recorded them onto PC, you could burn them to CD's as WAVs, and the quality will be identical to that of the original record, or you can compress them to MP3, when (as Chrisjl correctly points out) there will be a very slight quality degredation.

I got the impression that he only has the mp3 to work from, so importing into CoolEdit|SoundForge would mean decoding, splitting and re-encoding - a lossy process. If the source CDs are available I'd recommend CDex (www.cdex.n3.net/) to automate the whole process (including naming and tagging of artist, album and track titles)