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High Quality Audio Editing (Amateur)

S

speedemonV12

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 29, 2005
319
0
Hi guys, I have lots of House and Trance music that i want to edit, basically just take out the beginning of most these songs. They are all mp3, 320kbps. Most of them have been compressed to mp3 from lossless originals. I listen to my music through some Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro's and Audio-Technica ATH-ES7's. So I want to be able to edit out the beginning of these songs without losing quality. Would Fission work for me? Amadeus Pro? Garageband? Logic Pro? Pro Tools? Im not gonna be doing any fancy mixing, Just want to edit them, and fade in and out here and there. What do you guys recommend?

Thanks!
 
The problem when working with lossy files is that you will either end up with unnecessarily large lossless files or further compressed lossy files when exporting. You will need the originals to avoid this problem.
 
zosoaudo007 said:
Why's that?
Click to expand...

If you put lossy files in, you can either :

Export the result of your work in a lossless format, at the cost of ending up with pointlessly large files for the lossy source that you started with.

or

Export in a lossy format such as MP3, but then you're recompressing the already compressed files.
 
Jolly Jimmy said:
If you put lossy files in, you can either :

Export the result of your work in a lossless format, at the cost of ending up with pointlessly large files for the lossy source that you started with.

or

Export in a lossy format such as MP3, but then you're recompressing the already compressed files.
Click to expand...

Thats true, you are just degrading it further. Thanks for pointing that out. Made me realize something new.

It is better to cut the stuff up from the original files, but I would bet that cutting up a 320 kbps file and re-exporting it as another 320 kbps file wouldn't degrade it too "harshly" (harshly in the mp3 world). But like Jimmy pointed out you are definitely degrading the audio far more than you would if you were exporting mp3's from your original files.

If you are planning on playing these files at gigs or something I would def recommend cutting them up from your original wav files. If you are showing it to people, you don't want to have them listen to a degraded version of what you have. It would be like spending much time and effort to paint a picture, then show people a photograph of it instead of the original...doesn't make sense!

Either way Audacity is a free solution to cutting up the files and exporting them as mp3. Keep in mind, you need to download the lamelib files to do it.
 
thanks for the replies, learning a bit here....I will not be playing these at any gigs, these are for my personal use, and i will be sharing them with my friends. They will not be able to tell that the audio quality has gone down from editing tho, their equipment is not good enough. But I can tell. On Fissions's website, (http://rogueamoeba.com/fission/) they advertise no loss of quality when editing. Have you had any experience with this? or should I just stick with Audacity. Btw, I have Garageband, Fission, Audacity, and Logic Pro already. So its not like i have to worry about going out and buying them. I just want to know what one is best for this particular task.

thanks again
 
speedemonV12 said:
thanks for the replies, learning a bit here....I will not be playing these at any gigs, these are for my personal use, and i will be sharing them with my friends. They will not be able to tell that the audio quality has gone down from editing tho, their equipment is not good enough. But I can tell. On Fissions's website, (http://rogueamoeba.com/fission/) they advertise no loss of quality when editing. Have you had any experience with this? or should I just stick with Audacity. Btw, I have Garageband, Fission, Audacity, and Logic Pro already. So its not like i have to worry about going out and buying them. I just want to know what one is best for this particular task.

thanks again
Click to expand...

The issue isn't with which program you use. Any of them will work fine. It is with compressing an already compressed file.

Whatever program you use, it imports the mp3 as a WAV or AIFF file for editing. Basically this means that you have a really large mp3-quality file because all of the artifacts and compressed information is still there, it is just much bigger and used under a different file-type. If you compress the file after you edit it, you are again compressing what has already been compressed.

It would be like if you took that picture of the painting in my previous post and blew it up really big (it gets all pixelated, distorted and junky when you do this), then shrunk it back down to its original size. It would be its original size again, but you just shrunk down all the pixelated junk so it is the same as the big version. Not the best example because making it a WAV file doesn't degrade the audio, the original compression and at the end degrades it.

Here is a test: Put an mp3 into itunes and convert it to an mp3 again. Then take the newly compressed file and compress that again. Do that ten times. Keep the bit rate the same throughout (set it to 128 kbps or lower to really hear a difference). After the tenth time play the original mp3 and the one you get at the end and listen to how they stand next to each other. One is obviously worse than the other. Pick a song that has a nice long reverberant intro. I did it to AC/DC hells bells and the bell at the beginning sounds like absolute GARBAGE. Its a great test to see how inferior mp3's actually are than WAV files. That is exactly what you are doing when you edit an mp3 then export it out as mp3 again. You may have the edits you want, but now the audio is even further degraded.

An mp3 audio editor would be a nice fix for this issue because then you wouldn't have to keep exporting as a new mp3 file (and applying new compression). You could just save it to the already existing mp3 file. But to the best of my knowledge a program like that does not exist.
 
thanks for the info, that really helped. I guess ill just use Fission because that looks like it is the easiest one out of the ones that I have currently.
 
yes, i guess its a little missleading, basically i just didnt want to lose quality from the highest quality music that I have currently.
 
speedemonV12 said:
yes, i guess its a little missleading, basically i just didnt want to lose quality from the highest quality music that I have currently.
Click to expand...

Fission will do that for you! It does not re-encode and is the only audio editor I know of that will not lose quality when editing MP3s etc.

zosoaudo007 said:
An mp3 audio editor would be a nice fix for this issue because then you wouldn't have to keep exporting as a new mp3 file (and applying new compression). You could just save it to the already existing mp3 file. But to the best of my knowledge a program like that does not exist.
Click to expand...

Fission IS that program.
 
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