- mp3DirectCut
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mp3DirectCut Developer(s) Martin Pesch Stable release 2.13 / 2 January 2011 Operating system Windows
Wine officially supported[1]Type Digital audio editor License Freeware Website mpesch3.de1.cc/mp3dc.html mp3DirectCut is a lossless editor for MP3 (and to a degree, MP2) audio files, able to provide cuts and crops, copy and paste, gain and fades to audio files without having to decode or re-encode the audio. By modifying the global gain field of each frame of MPEG audio, the volume of that frame can be modified without altering the audio data itself. This allows for rapid, lossless MP3 audio editing that does not degrade the data from re-encoding.
mp3DirectCut provides audio normalization and pause (silence) detection, and can split long recordings into separate files based on cue points in the audio, such as those provided by pause detection. mp3DirectCut can also record audio directly to MP3 from the computer's sound card input.
All audio operations are performed using frame manipulation so, as such, mp3DirectCut is not a waveform editor. Audio clean-up such as click, hiss and noise removal is not possible.
Contents
Features
- An MP3 file can be edited without the data loss that would occur by expanding it to WAV format, editing, then recompressing it to MP3
- Cut, copy, paste, and volume change operations are provided; edits can be previewed, including a command that plays a segment without a selected region (previewing a cut)
- Audio normalization and pause detection
- MP3 recording with ACM or LAME encoder (not bundled)
- Fast MP3 visualization
- Supports Layer 2 (DVD/DVB audio)
- Includes a tag editor for ID3v1 tags
- Cue sheet support with auto cue (track division by time values)
- Track splitting with filename and ID3v1.1 tag creation
- VU meter, bitrate visualization
- Supported on all versions of Microsoft Windows from 95 through 7; certain modes can be invoked from the command line
- Unobtrusive: The installation file (as of February, 2009) is 190 Kbytes; the installed program occupies a single directory (with one subdirectory for non-English help files, which can be deleted if not needed); the program does not modify the Windows Registry; a user's manual and a page of Frequently Asked Questions is included in the installation
- The edited file can be used as a ringtone on mobile phones
Limitations
- Granularity limitations
- Edit positions in the file can only be placed at the start of an MP3 frame (of which there are typically about 38 per second).
- Gains and fades are limited to 1.5 dB steps, as they are achieved by modifying the value of the MP3 frame's 8-bit global gain field.
- Unimplemented features
- ID3v2 tags cannot be read, and if they are written out, they contain the incorrect song length if the length is modified.
- The documentation warns that navigating a song does not, in all cases, land on the start of an MP3 frame. The documentation does not guarantee correct results in all cases.
- The documentation is adequate but does not cover all cases.
- Possible introduction of error
- Increasing the audio volume can lead to distortion if, on playback, multiplying the audio data by the global gain may increase the volume past its clipping threshold. Audio recordings that use Compressed audio to cap the overall volume may have already adjusted the global gain field. This may limit the ability to further amplify the recording with MP3DirectCut without causing clipping.
See also
- MP3Gain, a lossless MP3 normalizer for Windows and Mac OS that uses the ReplayGain algorithm
- mp3splt - mp3 splitter
References
External links
Categories:- Audio editors
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