Editing large mp3 files

[RichardAOB]

I'm quite astonished by how good WavePad is for a program of its size, but there are two things I find frustrating: it can't cope with large files, and it seems to re-encode the separate parts of a sliced MP3 file.

 

Background: BBC Radio 3 are broadcasting the entire catalogue of Bach 24 hours a day for 10 days up to Christmas '05, and I'm recording the lot (I have to - it's my destiny). I record the transmissions in files up to 2 GB in size (about 8 hours at the settings I use) using CD Wave Editor - it alone seems to be able to handle huge files, and there's no pause for file-save between recordings because it saves direct to disc, so you can start the next recording in time for the next piece of music. I won't have enough disc space for this marathon broadcast so I use NCH Switch to convert the wav files to mp3 - no problem with big files there. I then delete the wav file to make space on the disc.

 

Now I want to cut out the speech and divide the large MP3 files into separate pieces of music. As we know, if you jump after a certain place in a large MP3 file on WavePad it plays the beginning of the file, not the displayed waveform. Splitting the file doesn't seem to work: the daughter file from after the split contains the waveform and sound from the beginning of the original file!

 

I tried out NCH Golden Record but gave up when I realised that, as with WavePad, the daughter files are re-encoded, corrupting the sound more. The best solution would be to edit the large wav files before converting to mp3, but I can't do that while recording, and I can't wait until the whole recording's finished as I will have run out of disc space before then.

 

None of these products seems to be able to split mp3 files and save them in their original state.

 

Am I missing something? If not, can someone suggest a product that will save fragments of mp3 files withour re-encoding them?

[huvi]

If you store the file(-s) in .wav format, and compress it with for example mpeg 3, will the sound be be more corrupted? It is worth a try.

 

 

 

I'm quite astonished by how good WavePad is for a program of its size, but there are two things I find frustrating: it can't cope with large files, and it seems to re-encode the separate parts of a sliced MP3 file.

 

Background: BBC Radio 3 are broadcasting the entire catalogue of Bach 24 hours a day for 10 days up to Christmas '05, and I'm recording the lot (I have to - it's my destiny).  I record the transmissions in files up to 2 GB in size (about 8 hours at the settings I use) using CD Wave Editor - it alone seems to be able to handle huge files, and there's no pause for file-save between recordings because it saves direct to disc, so you can start the next recording in time for the next piece of music.  I won't have enough disc space for this marathon broadcast so I use NCH Switch to convert the wav files to mp3 - no problem with big files there.  I then delete the wav file to make space on the disc.

 

Now I want to cut out the speech and divide the large MP3 files into separate pieces of music.  As we know, if you jump after a certain place in a large MP3 file on WavePad it plays the beginning of the file, not the displayed waveform.  Splitting the file doesn't seem to work: the daughter file from after the split contains the waveform and sound from the beginning of the original file!

 

I tried out NCH Golden Record but gave up when I realised that, as with WavePad, the daughter files are re-encoded, corrupting the sound more.  The best solution would be to edit the large wav files before converting to mp3, but I can't do that while recording, and I can't wait until the whole recording's finished as I will have run out of disc space before then.

 

None of these products seems to be able to split mp3 files and save them in their original state. 

 

Am I missing something?  If not, can someone suggest a product that will save fragments of mp3 files withour re-encoding them?

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