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.

accourding to my DH adobe audition should let you go in and edit an mp3 - he was going to check on this to make sure - however - his pager just went off - more info to follow if there is time

If you need a windows version of the commandline ffmpeg tool, which is a surprisingly useful little program, you can get it here: [link]

If you need a Mac version, you can get it through darwinports or fink, I believe. Or you can take the binary out of the application resources for ffmpegX, a gui for it and a bunch of other software that is aimed at working with video files.

Jon, this will do what you want and it does not decode/encode when it does it. All the work is done in the native MP3 format.

Thank you Nova & ND (and everyone else for trying)!