Removing/editing out "Easter Eggs"

SanDisk MP3 players Sansa® Fuze™
#1

I have a few albums that have Easter Eggs in the last track.  Given that these final tracks are up to 30 minutes long they take up a lot of space.  I reckon a whole ablums worth or more!

Can anyone recommend a free program to allow me to editing these tracks and remove/reduce the dead space?

Thanks

#2

Audacity… Its pretty easy to use.

#3

Thank you for the quick and positive reply.

I can now report that I’ve been there, done that (& even read a bit of the manual!) and saved a little over 80mb on just 4 tracks!

Thanks again

#4

WHat format are you using?  Blank space should compress pretty well (not that you want to listen to it).  I made a 10 minute silent wav file and converted to a few formats.

mp3  (Lame V5) - about 2 MB

ogg/Vorbis  q3         - 59 KB

FLAC                -  84 KB

For splitting up wav files into tracks (or deleting parts) I use CDWave . splitting is pretty much the only edit it does and the UI is pretty easy for that.

For splitting mp3 files, mp3directcut  is a little harder to figure out, but works directly on mp3 files so you don’t get degraded sound from a cycle of decode/reencode.

Message Edited by donp on 05-30-2009 09:33 AM

#5

I rip using WMP11 to MP3 @ 192 (and use MP3tag to edit the tags).

The Easter Eggs are (were) just additional recordings at the end of very long individual tracks - ie, a 30-odd minute track that consists of 5-6 mins of “proper”/advertised track followed by 20 minutes of silence and then a few minutes of the Easter Egg.

AFAIK, this only applied to 4 tracks in my collection (all Robbie Williams).  They are all edited now and I’ve retained the Easter Eggs by deleting the silence to a more reasonable few seconds on each track.

I was surprised (but pleased) at the space saved.  Maybe the “basic” nature of WMP’s MP3 ripping (I believe it’s CBR which probably makes a differnece) causes silence to eat up the same space as something more meaningful.

Again, many thanks for the prompt and useful replies.

#6

Hey, donp, thanks for mp3directcut!

 I was using Audacity, which does a lot of transcoding, and mp3directcut saves time and transcoding. Freeware, too!