Edit MP3 in place?

[james0tucson]

Hi all, I just realized I've never considered this before:

I'd like to edit an MP3 (just to trim a few seconds from the head) without expanding to wav and re-compressing, and I have no idea what tool does that. Any ideas?

[bduffy]

The only app I know off the top of my head is Sound Forge 7 and up. You can open, edit, and save to the original format.

[Patrick9]

WaveLab does this also.

[Sascha Franck]

Neither WaveLab or Soundforge are editing MP3s in place.
They are only "pretending" to do so because the conversion process is happening under the hood. After all there's still an MP3-> Wave > Editing > Wave->MP3 thing happening.

There's a few applications allowing you to change simple things in MP3 directly, such as lowering/raising volumes, which apparently only requires some tags or so to be altered. But there's nothing allowing you to, say, cut out a section or so. Even if invisible, this requires conversions.

[Glassback]

Adobe Audition

[james0tucson]

I just discovered what appears to be a purpose-built tool for this:
mp3directcut

http://www.mpesch3.de/

It seems to do the trick, editing mpeg without having to re-encode.

Gott segnen jene Deutschen programmierer!

[Glassback]

Hey, that's a cool little app!

Just grabbed it, I'll test it out later. Nice one.

[james0tucson]

Hey, that's a cool little app!

Just grabbed it, I'll test it out later. Nice one.

Thanks for letting me know Audition would do it -- I use AA constantly and didn't know that!

Also, in the course of this exercise, I have discovered that Audacity kicks ass.

[Sascha Franck]

I just discovered what appears to be a purpose-built tool for this:
mp3directcut

http://www.mpesch3.de/

It seems to do the trick, editing mpeg without having to re-encode.

Oh, that's a nice one, if you need any such things.
Didn't know this was possible until now.