I need some help finding the right application.

I'm looking for a way to cut out the section of silence between the last track and the "hidden track" on many CDs
I have.

I've poked around a bit, and have found programs which can cut the beginning and end of tracks.I have also found programs to split mp3s. Am I missing something in these programs?

Thanks for any and all help.
Mike

Mk2 #105 32g blue

MRHJr wrote:

> I'm looking for a way to cut out the section of silence between the last track and the "hidden track" on many CDs I have.

mp3asm will do this no problem - just tell it which frames you want to read (it will shove the ranges back together if you want; I normally save as two seperate tracks).

mp3asm doesn't like VBR files, contrary to its documentation. I think fixing this is a matter of changing one constant, but I haven't tried it yet. It's a pity, as it's most appropriate for chopping up VBR files (made with lame -v --no-res to avoid "spreading" the stream across unrelated frames), though if you're cutting during digital silence you'll be okay.

Personally, I rip to RIFF and edit those with XWave before encoding, rather than cutting the MP3 file itself.

All in Debian "woody" distribution and good source sites near you. You don't say which OS(es) you work with; I didn't notice any platform-specifics in mp3asm, but XWave is almost certainly X11-only.

--
Toby Speight

You don't really need one. What i usually do is the following:

Say the last song is #10 which has a ton of nothing on the end of it before "bonus" track #11, welp, then you just rip em both, get two tracks, and cut the nothingness off the end of #10.

If all the nothing is at the beginning of track #11, just do the same thing but cut all the nothing off the beginning of #11.

If they are contained in the same track #, basically two songs with a bunch of space between em on one track, just make a copy of the mp3, cut off the nothing and last song on one and the nothing and first song on the other.

If you want to just subtract the nothing (which i can't see wanting, seeing as how they are more than likely two different songs and thusly should be two different tracks, i haven't see that feature on any programs i use... but i'm sure it exists.


|| loren.cox ||

I don't know of any software that will do this automatically.

In all cases, it requires user intervention, i.e., you have to listen to the silent gap between the last track and the bonus track, and write down the time index numbers where you want to split the file.

I haven't yet seen any ripper software that automatically detects this situation an builds the tracks correctly to begin with. I'm not sure it's even possible to do that, with the CD-audio format the way it is.

Here's how I handle the situation:

- Rip the album normally.

- Listen to the MP3 of the last track in WinAmp, while looking at the time counter. Make sure it's counting up, not counting down. (Click on the time counter to switch it between count-up and count-down mode.)

- Write down the time index for the end of the normal track. Give it a little "slop" at the end to cover the fadeout/decay at the end.

- Write down the time index for the start of the bonus track. Give it a second of "slop" at the beginning to cover the fact that you can't trim files to the exact start of a waveform.

- Use the "split a large MP3" feature of my GapKiller application, feeding it the time-index values I just noted.

- This creates three files: The normal track, a track of silence, and the bonus track. Throw away the silent track.

- If necessary, rename and fix the tags of the two properly-split tracks.

___________
Tony Fabris

Thanks to all who have responded.
I will try all methods and see which works easiest for me.

I was kinda hoping for an app that cut between point A and point B, then auto merged.
Life should be so easy!

Mk2 #105 32g blue

You could just create 2 separate songs adjusting the start and end points in you ripping SW.
Then in Emplode, make a playlist with just these songs in it and don't set the randomise function. this way the songs should always be played consecutively in whatever playlist you put them.

Murray 06000047
Just increasing my post count

Adjusting the track start and end points might be tricky, depending on the software in question. For instance, your software might not let you "add another track" for the bonus track. You could rip the last track twice, I suppose, adjusting its start and end points with each rip. Still, I don't know of any software that'll do it automatically or transparently.

Also:

I don't think that playing the two songs consecutively was one of his requirements. I think all he wanted was a way to easily get two correctly-sized tracks out of the one big lastsong+bonus track.

But if playing the two songs together (or playing ANY two songs together) is a requirement, it's pretty easy to stitch two MP3s together. Since MP3 is a streaming format, simply appending the files is usually enough:

- Correct the files so that the silence is removed, as described in the other post.

- Remove any ID3 tags from the first MP3 file, for instance, using a recent version of WinAmp.

- Use the DOS "copy" command to append the files to each other:

copy file1.mp3 + file2.mp3 largefile.mp3

- If necessary, correct the file name and tags of the resulting "combined" file.

I sometimes do this for certain pieces that sound good when played together.

___________
Tony Fabris

Or you could grab the file from the cd into a WAV editor or something. Cooledit pro maybe.
Then manually take out the silent part and encode the resulting track. I used CEP to create the extra hidden track on Superjesus' Sumo. It's a great standalone track Audiograbber was used to create the WAV and CEP to edit then back to AG to encode.

There are a number of methods but all require manual intervention. If the CD indicates that there is one track, then that's what you'll get. It might be possible to make a program to recognise tracks with a gap longer than n seconds and split the tracks. But as the number of these CDs is low I doubt this will come out soon. AFAICT

Murray 06000047
Just increasing my post count

What would be cool is if the CDDB could store the information about the bonus track. Then any CDDB-aware ripping software could read this information and create the correct number of tracks and start/end points.

On second thought, scratch that. The first guy to rip a given CD would be the one responsible for entering the correct time indices. These are the same people who can't figure out how to spell or capitalize...

___________
Tony Fabris

Muzza wrote:

>It might be possible to make a program to recognise tracks with a gap longer than n seconds and split the tracks.

I haven't tried, but...

If you use a programmable editor like SND, you should be able to write a function to do this in very short order. Apparently its extension language is a lisp-alike, so it ought to be just like writing emacs code to split a file if there's 50 blank lines. This only works on the PCM (eg. RIFF aka WAV) file, of course.

--
Toby Speight

copy file1.mp3 + file2.mp3 largefile.mp3

I would have set the /B flag to indicate a binary file, i.e., copy /B file1.mp3 + file2... etc. Or is that not necessary for MP3 files?

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

WHOOPS! You're right, Doug. Don't forget that /B switch, guys!

___________
Tony Fabris