Free Portable MP3 Cutter and Editor

If you do not belong to the people who write the music and create sophisticated sound effects, you may not need complicated and features-rich audio editor utility. But, as regular computer user, you still have to deal once a while with need to modify mp3 tracks on your PC.

Just several possible situation of non-professional mp3 modification:

·         Trimming audio file to create personalized ringtone for your mobile phone.

·         Changing volume for your audio clip for various purposes.

·         Creation of fade out and fade in sound effects, while preparing sound track for your slide show.

If you mentally prepare inventory of all activities you do with audio files on your PC, you will definitely be able to add other situation, when you need simple and straightforward mp3 file editing.

Free portable utility from MuseTips - MP3 Cutter and Editor – will be quite handy for all situations mentioned above and many other.

The following commands are supported:

·         Delete Selected: Deletes selected part from the mp3 document.

·         Delete Unselected: Deletes unselected part from the mp3 document.

·         Change Volume: Changes audio volume by specifying a percentage value.

·         Maximize Volume: Increases volume as high as possible without distortion.

·         Fade In: Gradually increases the volume throughout the selection.

·         Fade Out: Gradually decreases the volume throughout the selection.

·         Convert to Stereo: Duplicates mono track to make a stereo track.

·         Convert to Mono: Mixes all channels to make a mono track.

Website: http://www.musetips.com/free-mp3-cutter-and-editor.html

Free Lightweight MP3 Editor

For those who download music from Internet and create personal audio collection, the free, small, portable, easy to use, and efficient MP3 editor can be a valuable addition to the software kit. The main target of the utility is to improve general quality of your MP3 collection.

What exactly can mpTrim do for you?

* mpTrim can trim MP3s - removing silent or unwanted parts. You can set the trim positions in seconds or by frame number, or use auto-detection to trim silence from the file.

* mpTrim can adjust the volume of MP3s. Volume change can be manual or automatic (volume normalization).

* mpTrim can fade-in/out MP3s (to fix abrupt beginning/ending). You can choose from 3 pre-defined fading effects.

* mpTrim can clean-up MP3s and recover wasted disk space.

* mpTrim keeps the music quality intact, no matter how many times you process an MP3, because it works directly in the MP3 format without having to decode/re-encode. That also makes it very fast.

* mpTrim supports ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags, and can either maintain existing tags, remove them, or update them when the file is edited.

mpTrim is ultimate freeware with no evaluation period or time limit. It is available in many languages.

Operating systems:  Win98/Me/NT4/2K/XP/Vista/Windows 7.

Limitations: For large files (more than 7 minutes audio clips) the system will asks you to consider a for-pay upgrade to PRO version of the program.

Website: http://www.mptrim.com/

Screenshot:

Do you need to cut your mp3 files?

mp3DirectCut is a small, fast, and highly efficient  tool for editing MP3 audio files. You can remove parts, change the volume, split files or copy regions to new files, all without the need to decompress your MP3 into PCM/WAV. This saves work, encoding time and disk space with no quality losses.

mp3DirectCut is a fast and extensive audio editor and recorder for compressed mp3. You can directly cut, copy, paste or change the volume with no need to decompress your files for audio editing. This saves encoding time and preserves the original quality, because nothing will be re-encoded. The built in recorder creates mp3 on the fly from your audio input. Using Cue sheets, pause detection or Auto cue you can easily divide long files.

Main Features

* Non-destructive cut, copy, paste

* Volume change, fade, normalize, pause detection

* mp3 recording with ACM or Lame encoder

* Fast mp3 visualization and easy navigation

* Supports Layer 2 (dvd/dvb audio)

* ID3v1.1 tag editor · ID3v2 tag keeping

* Cue Sheet support

* Auto cue (track dividing by time values)

* Track splitting with filename and tag creation

* Trim · Crop · Fast play · Loop play

* VU meter, bitrate visualization

* High speed recorder · Command line usage

* Unicode support

Authors’ website: http://mpesch3.de1.cc/mp3dc.html

Best Free CD Ripper: Exact Audio Copy

One day, you may find out that you have more music CDs, that storage place in your apartment can handle. The logical step would be rip all the music collection to the hard drive and keep it handy for further burning as needed or simple transfer to the MP3 player or mobile phone. Some of the old disks you have might be already scratched and slightly distorted over the long-term use. So, for this task, you need not just any CD Ripper software utility, but a really good one.

The competition on the market for these products is strong. There are lots of rippers available. All media players including Windows Media Player can rip. You can find both free utilities and commercial products with versatile sets of features. Most of the utilities will rip to WAV, MP3 and usually several other formats. But when it comes to handling scratched and dirty disks, rippers will vary greatly upon their ability to handle the problematic media. Some will simply get stuck, others will skip forward over the problem track, or create a silent gap.  However, the best programs will try repeatedly to fix the problem with no audible effects.

Today, I would like to present one of the best products to rip the music disks with less than perfect media surface - Exact Audio Copy. This utility can be characterized by the following main features, essential for your task:

• It is free (for non-commercial purposes).
• All kinds of CD and DVD drives are supported (including USB, Firewire, SATA and SCSI drives)
• Hidden sector synchronization (jitter correction)
• A secure, a fast and a burst extraction methods selectable. Fast extraction should run at the same speed as other grabbers with jitter correction, but is probably not exact anymore. Burst mode just grabs the audio data without any synchronization.
• Detection of read errors and complete losses of sync and correction in the secure mode, as far as possible
• Output of time positions of all non-exact corrections and the possibility to listen to these positions
• EAC is able to copy ranges of music data, not only tracks
• Automatic speed reduction on read errors and fallback to a higher speed afterwards (depends on the used drive)
• Volume normalization of extracted audio to a given percentage
• Usage of the Windows Audio Compression manager (ACM Codecs) for direct compression to e.g. MP3 waves
• Support for the LAME DLL that is usable like an ACM Codec for on-the-fly MP3 compression
• Support of external MP3, WMA, flac and OggVorbis encoders for automatic compression after extraction (supports multi-processor environments)
• Batch compression to WAV files and decompression of supported encoded files to WAV
• Compression offset support for exact compression/decompression
• Detection of pre-track gaps (positions where negative track times runs towards 00:00:00)
• Detection of silence in pre-track gaps
• Automatic creation of CUE sheets for Burnnn, Feurio, Nero or even EAC, which can include all gaps, indicies, track attributes, UPC and ISRC and also CD-Text for an exact copy
• CD player functionality and prelistening to selected ranges
• Automatic detection of drive features, whether a drive has an accurate stream and/or does caching
• Sample offsets for drives with non-accurate streams, including the option of filling up missing samples with silence
• Synchronizing between tracks for non-accurate stream drives
• Trackname editing with local/remote CD databases support and more features like ID3 tagging
• Browse and edit local database
• Certified Escient ® CDDB(TM)Compatible
• Local CDDB support
• Record and loop record functions for recording from LP, radio, etc.
• Automatic renaming of MP3 files according to their ID3 tag
• Catalog extraction function (e.g. first 20 seconds of a track)
• Multisession (CD-Extra) support
• CD-Text support
• CD-Write support for some drives (internally and using CDRDAO)
• ID3 V1.1 tag editor with drag and drop ability from track listing and CD database browser
• Glitch removal after extraction
• Small WAV editor with the following functionality: delete, trim, normalize, pad, glitch removal, pop detection, interpolation of ranges, noise reduction, fade in/out, undo (and much more)

Authors’ website: http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/

Download page: http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/index.php/resources/download/

Screenshot:

Audacity - One of the Best Free Professional Audio Editors

Audacity is free, award-winning open source multi-platform software for recording and editing sound. It runs on Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. Audacity is universally recognized as the number one software program for creating podcasts. Hundreds of thousands of amateurs and professionals alike have created podcasts using Audacity.

Audacity supports several digital audio formats with support for 24 bit and 32 bit sample formats as well as 16 bit. Supported formats include: WAV; AIFF; OGG; MP3

Professional features

1. Envelope editing.
2. Built-in effects processing.
3. Mixing of tracks.
4. Recording overdubs while playing previously recorded tracks.

For sound analysis you may use the spectrogram mode or a spectrum analyzer window. Also Audacity has built-in effects and supports the following plug-ins (providing additional effects and processing): LADSPA Plug-ins; Nyquist Plug-ins; VST Plug-ins (Windows and Mac only), and Vamp Plug-ins (Beta 1.3.4 and later only).

Main Operations

Recording audio

Audacity can be used to record from your computer’s sound card or other audio device. Audacity can record up to 2 channels (stereo) on all systems, and 4 or more channels on some systems. Audacity records directly to disk, and it will record as long as you want. The approximate length of time remaining is displayed in the status bar at the bottom of the display. The Pause button allows you to temporarily stop recording, but it keeps Audacity ready and waiting, so that it will begin recording again instantly when you click it again.

Displaying the audio

Audacity has four main types of audio displays

1. Waveform
2. Waveform (dB) (logarithmic scale)
3. Spectrogram (shows energy in different frequencies)
4. Pitch (attempts to follow the frequency of a musical line)

You can perform the following operations with tracks:

1. Resize a track by clicking near the bottom and dragging it up or down.
2. Zoom into a track vertically (to make quiet parts larger).
3. Zoom into tracks horizontally (to see more detail about less time).
4. View the frequency response of a selection.

Playing audio

Audacity supports most soundcards and audio devices. Choose your device in the Preferences dialog, in the Audio I/O tab, then set the playback volume using the control in the toolbar. Note that the control is independent of your system’s master volume control. Use your operating system to set this volume. Audacity mixes down to mono or stereo. You can work with as many tracks as you want, but Audacity plays everything through either the left or right speaker. Audacity automatically mixes multiple tracks and resamples all tracks to match the project rate (in the lower-left corner of the window).

Editing audio

Unlimited Undo lets you to revert actions all the way back to when you first opened the project. Audacity splits tracks into small blocks internally, so large cut and paste operations are quick because they don’t require rewriting the entire track each time a change is made.

Lots of basic editing operations:

- Cut
- Copy
- Paste
- Trim (delete everything except selection)
- Delete
- Silence
- Split
- Duplicate
- Find Zero Crossings

Mixing, panning, and warping

Audacity automatically mixes when you have more than one track open. It automatically resamples as necessary.

Generating audio

Built-in generators: Silence; Tone (Sine, Square, Sawtooth); White Noise. Plug-in generators included with Audacity: Click Track (like a metronome); Pluck.

Applying effects

Audacity has many built-in effects and also supports plug-in effects in the LADSPA, VST, and Nyquist formats. Built-in effects include:

- Amplify (including automatic normalization/peak calculation up to clipping value)
- Bass Boost
- Change Pitch (without changing tempo)
- Change Speed (changes both pitch and tempo together, like speeding up or slowing down a record player)
- Change Tempo (without changing pitch)
- Compressor (dynamic range compressor)
- Echo
- Equalization
- Fade In (changing the volume: from no volume to actual volume)
- Fade Out (changing the volume: from actual volume to no volume)
- FFT Filter
- Invert
- Noise Removal
- Normalize
- Phaser
- Repeat
- Reverse
- Wahwah

Developers' website: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Project Additional Information: Audacity Wiki

Direct Download: http://audacity.googlecode.com/files/audacity-win-2.0.5.exe