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