Mp3TrueEdit
mp3TrueEdit is a software application for Mac OS X and Windows that allows users to edit 'lossy' compressed MP3 files without decompressing and re-compressing the audio information and hence maintains the original sound quality.
Its 'direct' editing of MP3 files is achieved by splitting, joining and trimming audio on the MP3 frame BOUNDARIES. In addition each MP3 frame can have its individual volume level adjusted by modifying the global gain field in the frame's header.
It differentiates its self from a full blown digital audio workstation but shares many of their features such as recording and editing using cut, copy, paste and crop commands. In addition FADE in and out operations and volume level adjusting operations such as normalization can be performed.
It is not however able to perform other more advanced editing operations that would require decompression and processing of the raw PCM audio information such as effects and cross fading.
As part of its freemium business model mp3TrueEdit allows free use of its MP3 recording features using the LAME encoder.
Features
- No degradation in audio quality when editing MP3 files.
- Edits can be made quickly and easily without the need for decompression and re-compression.
- Prevents corruption of frame information allowing edits to made at any location.
- Greatly reduced disk space usage when editing MP3 files.
- Quick visualization of MP3 audio information to aid finding and editing audio.
- Familiar cut, copy, paste, delete and crop operations with unlimited undo and redo.
- Fade in, fade out, normalization and volume level adjustments.
- Make any section of audio completely silent or insert new silent sections.
- Track splitting with ID3 metadata tagging.
- MP3 recording with ACM or LAME encoder (not bundled).
Limitations
- Granularity limitations
- Editing operations can only be performed at the start of an MP3 frame (typically 26 ms in length).
- Gains and fades are limited to 1.5 dB steps, as they are achieved by modifying the value of the MP3 frame's global gain field.
- effects such as filters, mixing or crossfading between sources is not possible as this would require decompression and re-compression with an associated quality loss.
- Unimplemented features
- Automatically splitting audio based on CUE sheets is not supported.
See also
- MP3Gain, a lossless MP3 normalizer for multiple platforms that uses the ReplayGain algorithm
- Mp3splt - mp3 splitter
- mp3DirectCut a lossless editor for MP3.