How to cut and join a lossless file

Audacity will do the trick, and no to your last question, as AIFF is an uncompressed format.

cyberpunk said:

I understand that Lossless to lossless will not result in quality loss. much appreciated.

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Though lossless is not the same as uncompressed, just to be clear.

cyberpunk said:

How to cut and join an apple lossless file? If I import an aiff file into audacity edit it an export as aiff will this lose quality?

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With lossless files the quality will remain the same if al you do in the editor is cut out a section. But if the cut is done poorly you will introduce a "click" or "pop". One might argue that introducing an artifact is degrading the sound.

But make the cut on a zero crossing and you will not introdce the click

There are utilities which will allow you to concatenate mp3 files without decoding/re-encoding the files, so there's no loss in quality.

If you want to do more than than, i.e. actually cut out a segment from one and concatenate it with another file, I believe you'll need to decode the data first using some editor which understands mp3 (e.g. Audacity). This will degrade quality since you then need to re-encode it after doing the cut/paste work.