Erin, I suggest that you download and install openoffice. [link]

It's an excellent free program that's fullly compatible with MS Office and will keep your bullet as they are.

I love Wordperfect, but only when I originate documents in it. Converting from Word into Wordperfect is a nightmare.

Anyone else encountering the Comcast DNS issue tonight? If you're in the same boat, you can manually point to different Comcast DNS servers (68.47.160.6 and 68.47.160.5 are ones I got from another board) and it should work. I've been having connection issues all day and thought it was my adapter and/or router.

huh. i was wondering what was going on. felt like i had dial-up again last night. everything was painfully slow.

I've got a long mp3 file that I want to edit. I need to chop off a couple minutes from the beginning and the end. I have several high end audio editors, but I'm pretty sure they would effectively convert the mp3 to a wav file when I opened it, and then convert it back to mp3 after I edited and resaved it. I'd rather avoid reconverting it since you lose some fidelity that way.

Is it possible to edit an mp3 file without converting it back and forth? Anyone know of any editors that do that?

Goldwave will do it.

Jon, I've done that kind of editing in CoolEdit 2000, but I have no idea if an internal conversion to .wav occurs or not. The thought never occurred to me until just now.

dcp -- how do you know it's not doing the conversion?

Ack. You're right. Searching around the help file, I found this:

Note that to open MPEG Layer 3 files (.mp3) you must have the new Windows Media Player installed.

Audacity will do it.

Well, Jon, if all I wanted to do was cut stuff off the beginning and end, I wouldn't use a normal audio editing tool at all. Because of the way MP3 works, I'm fairly sure, doing things like cutting things out of the middle, adding effects, and whatnot is pretty difficult without a conversion, so any editing program that allows such things will probably internally convert (though I could be wrong about this). For cutting off blocks and the front and back of a file, I would use the command-line ffmpeg tool (available for linux and mac, and maybe windows as well). Say I have a file, song.mp3, that is 6 minutes long, and I want to cut off a minute each from the beginning and end (for a total of a 4 minute track), then I'd use this command (without the bracketted stuff):

ffmpeg -i song.mp3 -t 300 [ending position in seconds] -ss 60 [starting position in seconds] -acodec copy shorter_song.mp3

That said, there may be gui programs out there whose entire purpose is snipping things off of mp3s, like there are for video files (avis), rather than full-featured editing programs. Those probably won't internally convert, as they'll pretty much use the same algorithms as ffmpeg (or even just be a frontend to them).

One way to guess if its internally converting: if it takes a minute or so to save the file, then it's probably encoding again. If it saves instantly, there's just no time.

ETA: Audacity definitely internally converts. At least the Mac version does, and I'd assume it's the same for the Windows/Linux versions.

Audacity definitely internally converts.

Huh. That's what I get for paying so very much attention. Thank you.