Edit MP3s without re-encoding?
 

This may seem somewhat basic, but I've never done this and am coming up empty on solutions...

Is there freeware that will allow you to add silence to an MP3 without re-encoding it? The ones I've tried (mp3DirectCut, mp3TrueEdit) are too simple or restrictive. Much thanks!

Don't know about the "without re-encoding it" part but audacity can add silence.
You can save new file in MP3 or Wav or many other formats, with Wav, you can then re-encode back to MP3.
Audacity will likely inform that you will need to download a lame MP3 encoder to re-encode to MP3.
It will direct to proper download.

Maybe Admin will come along later with better suggestion, his knowledge is superior to mine.

I'm not aware of any way to edit audio without a re-encode.
But unlike video, audio can put up with a few generations, assuming you're not starving it of bitrate.

Perhaps now would be a good time to consider using lossless FLAC containers, instead of MP3?
That's been my solution to restoring audio, without losing more quality, and without sacrificing disk space.

My favorite freeware audio editor is Audacity.

Yes of course you can do this, I've used mp3directcut before and there should be something like that where you can splice in silence that you've made of your own. I know what you mean by restrictive, it's a lot of manual steps to silence a particular section (or add gaps between songs). If you could find command line tools that do it, it could be automated.

There's one other way; there's a type of volume command in mp3's and you could "hide" the audio losslessly. This is how replaygain works I believe, not to hide audio of course but to normalize volume. Or maybe ti's just a special tag - anyhow, I know the mp3 spec and I know there's a volume for each frame. I could possibly modify some mp3 player code to do this, but it's a big project.

So yeah, technically possible, but never been done.

--merged --

Oh, here's a sneaky way to do it. Mux the audio with a random video track into an mpg, then edit with a lossless (or peephole) video editor (like videoredo, except one that does audio). These programs are designed to only touch the parts that change, the rest is lossless.

This doesn't really work with mp3 as it isn't the standard audio track of mpg2 or mpg4, but mp3, ac3, aac could all be edited this way.

Ohhh... I like that. :thumb: