I've been looking at MC9's Media Editor (version 1.142 that comes with 9.0). Of the things I'd like to do with an editor, it seems like it's not powerful enough to do hard ones (noise reduction), but too powerful to easily do one simple thing (join mp3 files).
Unless I'm missing something, here's what I have to do to join 2 or more mp3 files (something I expect to do a fair amount of because of the way classical CDs are often split up -- good for the CD, not so good for iPod):
1. Import files into Media Editor. Nice that drag & drop works. Wait for them to be converted to wav (slow).
2. Click "New". (And why doesn't New tile its window if I've set my other windows to tile?)
3. Click in first mp3 file, select all (Ctrl-A), Copy.
4. Click in new window, Paste.
5. Click in second file, select all (Ctrl-A), Copy.
6. Click in new window. I wish I could just say Paste, but instead I have to click at the very right end to set the insertion point at the end. Sure would be nice to have a command to do this, since it's hard to click at the exact end (though zooming in several times helps a little). Then Paste.
7. Repeat for 3rd to nth files, if any.
8. In new window do File|Save. Change the requested format from wav to mp3 (too bad it couldn't notice that I started with mp3's, but I suppose it's hard to read the user's mind). Wait for it to be converted to mp3 (slow).
(Okay, so I could skip steps 2-4 if I make the first file be the destination. I usually avoid doing that sort of thing, since it risks overwriting the original file by a careless slip of the fingers, but I see in this case there's still a dialog box interposed (probably since I started with an mp3, not a wav).)
In contrast, for this task, I've tried TFM's MPEG Audio Scissors, which is a very no-frills program oriented to this particular task. It works without decoding the source and re-encoding the result, so it's speedy. And it knows I want to join, so I don't have to go thru steps 2-7 above. It even lets me do simple cuts (e.g., to get rid of trailing silence). Unfortunately, it has a bug that causes it to fail ("Division by zero") when reading some mp3 files (so far it's always on files that have a lot of silence at the end).
Does anyone else have a favorite free mp3 joiner?
Author
Topic: Joining MP3 files (Read 1906 times)