Ripping Problem in AC

I'm using Xing-Audiocatalyst for ripping and am quite happy with Variable Bit Rate - Normal/High Quality encoding. Am running into a problem ripping one particular track. The album says that the track lasts 2:33 - AC believes that it is 5:04 long and unless I set synch-width at 10, it loses synchronisation and aborts the rip.

At synch-width 10, it grabs the full 5:04 of the track. First as a wav, later as as MP3. Immedeately after 2:33 there is a long period of silence; the last 1:30 is very noisy and loud. It sounds like data; not music.

Does anybody know how to extract the first 2:33 from either the wav or mp3 file?

Henno

The noise probably is data. A lot of CDs now contain a little bit of ROM data at the end so they can add little multimedia programs that will run when you put the CD in your computer. An example of this is Sheryl Crow's "The Globe Sessions". There's a little program tacked onto the disc with lyrics, extra liner notes, and whatnot.

To delete unwanted parts from the intermediate .WAV file, use a wave editor such as CoolEdit before encoding the file. If you want to remove sections from the MP3 after it has been encoded, use MP3Trim.

You can also edit the MP3 file directly yourself if you like, if you're comforable with hexadecimal notation and you can use a binary editor such as UltraEdit. You can locate the headers of the individual frames and trim the file on those boundaries.

Enjoy!

-- Tony Fabris -- Empeg #144 --
Caution: Do not look into laser with remaining good eye.

Some ripper software allows you to rip specific sections of a track. You might not be limited to ripping just the whole track. Sometimes you can specify what time index markers to rip, depending on the software. Since I don't use Audiocatalyst, I don't know if it offers you this option. But if it did, that would be the easiest way to get rid of the noise: just rip the first part of the track- you already know what timestamp to enter for the end of the rip. Then you wouldn't have to do any after-the-fact editing at all.

Let me know what you end up doing.



-- Tony Fabris -- Empeg #144 --
Caution: Do not look into laser with remaining good eye.

Some ripper software allows you to rip specific sections of a track . . .Since I don't use Audiocatalyst, I don't know if it offers you this option

AC does have this option, but it has been automated so much that it cannot be used for my problem. It supports offsets to target the track data more precisely, but only in 'frames'. If I remember correctly, this is limited to offsets at the start and end of a track by up to 150 frames (postive and negative). As 75 frames is about one second, it doesn't help much: killing 3 minutes would require 150 rips ; too much for a saturday night !

It also allows to eliminate all, or part of the silent part before and/or after any track. I tried this, but it didn't work. Most likely because the noisy part doesn't qualify as silence!

I'll let you know how I fare. Thanks again.

Henno #120

To delete unwanted parts . . . [etc]

Toni, thanks for your help. It is exactly what I was hoping to get out of my post. I would have been happy with any one of the methods you mention. I've tried all your suggestions. Here are my comments;

CoolEdit looks great. Will most likely do the job (and much more). But too expensive at US$ 399 ! The trial version (good for 45 days) can't save anything. Discarded

MP3Trim is exactly right. Is a must have compagnion for any of us empeg-ers! Powerful and easy. Nice, simple user interface. Only criticism is that it has no help function and some of the options are a bit cryptic (autor's home page has a FAQ though). MP3Trim allows you to delete part of of an MP3 file (you can specify time and number of frames) from the beginning and/or end. It can also automatically eliminate leading or trailing silence. I manually set it to kill the last 2 minutes of my problem file (the data junk plus some of the silence) which took just seconds. Loaded this shortened file again to automatically remove the remaining 'digital silence'. MP3trim actually removed a few seconds more than I had calculated. What remained is the net contents of the track. MP3Trim is freeware and small (only 181k).

Same author (same site) publishish WaveTrim. Same neat and simple user interface.The freeware version can automatically remove digital silence at beginning/end but you cannot specify how much. You can't trim off non-silence (junk) either. It can also add silence at the end and there is an option to fill a partially-full end-sector (for CD players not smart enough to handle this, it says; Ididn't know this could be a problem). Besides these digital edits it can trim waht it calls 'analog silence' (sound level below x dB). It is freeware too; the PRO version includes normalization. I won't need this: AudioCatalyst plus MP3Trim do all of this and more.

I haven't checked out UltraEdit; MP3Trim does all I need. Have stored a copy of MP3 frame header layouts just in case I want to play with it in the future. Recommended reading for all of us who want to play around with the MP3 file format.

NB: note for Hugo:
MP3Trim can also recreate VBR info. Could this cure the tracking errors of VBR files??


Toni, thanks again. Happy to have you on bboard

Henno

I haven't tried this myself, but it might help...

Right click on the track name in AC, and choose Properties. You can set the start and end times of the track (relative to its position on the CD in minutes and seconds or sectors. I think this limits the amount of the track that gets ripped. It's probably easier than trying to count frames :)

You can actually use this method to run two or more tracks together...


Geoff
---- -------
Reg No. 554, s/n 00064 - It's mine I tell you.... all mine :)

Right click on the track name in AC, and choose Properties. You can set the start and end times

Thanks for the tip Geoff, I just tried it out and it works too. Too bad that AC keeps this feature so well hidden. I recommend that you aslo playing around with MP3Trim (Toni F's suggestion; see our posts earlier). It automatically removes all starting/trailing silence, so you should be able to glue files together seamlessly.

Henno

Cooledit 2000 is a sort of cut down version of cooledit, but it can also read and write MP3's and whats more it only costs 69 usd.
More info at http://www.cooledit.com/
(I have no connection with them, blah blah blah.. =)

Jazz
(List 112, S/N 00030, 4 gig blue)

It automatically removes all starting/trailing silence, so you should be able to glue files together seamlessly.

I've run into trouble in the past, attempting to make MP3s seamless (for example, on Pink Floyd albums). I don't own AudioCatalyst, so I don't know if its VBR encoding fixes the problem. But when encoding at 128kbps with Fraunhofer, you can't control how the encoder deals with the gaps between the songs.

As a result, even if you start with two perfectly seamless .WAV files, the Fraunhofer encoder is going to artificially insert partial frames of silence at the beginning and end of the MP3. In this case, the only way to make the MP3's play seamlessly is if you perform trial-and-error trimming of the frames by hand.

Since I got really fed up with doing this using a one-file-at-a-time program like MP3Trim, I decided to partially automate the process. I wrote a little program that allows you to interactively trim the gap between songs on 128kbps MP3 files. It's very beta, and very limited right now, but if you want to check it out, it's at my home page.

Does anyone have any definitive answer as to whether AudioCatalyst can rip a Pink Floyd album so that the individual MP3 files play back seamlessly?


-- Tony Fabris -- Empeg #144 --
Caution: Do not look into laser with remaining good eye.