Hi!
I have a bit of a problem. I want to encode the first 45-60 seconds of audio to mp3 for a website. I was thinking of encoding about 1minut of audio and then stoping lame and then cutting and fading out the mp3 with some other tool. So, will stopping the encoding process in lame (abr) damage the mp3 (the last frame will be incomplete and there will be a missing XING HEADER - at least that is what i think)

Sorry for a newbie question (for my english too)

Why not just cut the wav file before encoding?

Edit: The comment has been retracted and a formal apology posted below.

Argggh! I'm no longer an MP3 proponent, but even before I got out of the MP3 world XING was noted for its attrocious quality. Do your users a favor and use LAME instead. Providing a short sample already discourages people from pirating your sample, so put your best foot forward and provide a good quality sample.

G

Xing header means VBR header. :sign:

?? ?? ?? ??

Where did you read he would be using Xing??

He talked about XING HEADERS - they are VBR headers used by Lame. He said from the beggining he would be using lame.

Regards;

Roberto.

My bad, been out of the MP3 world for a while and have no technical background with any of the encoders. The capitalized XING jumped out at me and I responded to that rather than carefully reading the whole thing. Please disregard the previous post.

Actually if there's nothing needed at the end of a wav file (someone else will have to validate that) you could probably just use a simple batch file to cut all your files.

I'm not sure if CoolEdit does it, but I know CoolEditPro allows the creation of a batch script that would take the wav files, select the first 60 seconds of so, trim the file, select the last two seconds or so and apply a fade, then save the file. The batch process could then be run on all the samples you'd like to post.

G

Looks like i confused a bit. I'm looking for a complete batch sollution. I have about 70-100 albums to reencode for my website (as samples what is on the album). So what You suggested earlier (cutting the wav file in an audio editing program) is rather impossible.

So, i was thinking maybe of encoding in lame till it reaches about 25%, than stop the current file (I'm still thinking of abr), and than make a fade out with some tool (forgot it's name). But the vbr tag problem will remain...

Any ideas? PLEASE HELP!!!

I fail to see how CoolEdit wouldn't do what you want, unless you wanted the batch solution to also encode into MP3 (CoolEdit's MP3 encoder is reportedly craptacular). CoolEdit, or any other audio editor with batch edit abilities would easily take a set of wavs (you can add all the files you want from any directory) and do the editing I described before. A batch encoder would then encode all the trimmed output files properly without the tag issues. It'll still involve some manual work, but it's much better than doing every single file by hand the whole way through.

G

BeSweet supports partial encoding.
example of commandline :


advised commandline :

find a friend who can code a small program for you that saves the first few seconds from each wav to a new file, calls lame.exe to encode that snippet and deletes the source file after Lame has finished encoding.

@gdougherty
Sorry, I was in kind of a hurry and didn't read it to the end. My mistake!

I guess mp3trim would satisfy your needs! Check it at http://www.logiccell.com/~mp3trim/

Unfortunately you will have to get the Pro Version (which is much more expensive, but it seems worth it for your kind of assembly-line work)

It has 'thumbnail' batch creation (for example to extract the first 30 seconds of your tracks, for preview)
And you can fade out (and fade in) the songs, too!
Just drag and drop the folders with your mp's on mp3trim and it will do exactly what you asked for! (even the id3-tags will remain)!

Of course you will have to encode every song completely to mp3 first!

But then it it will work, you will just have to wait!

P.S. Be sure to get the newest beta Version of the Pro Version! The latest official one was 1.77a and unfortunately kills (deletes) the LAME tag with the information about the encoder settings. Could be worse, though. The quality won't be affected, anyway!

Good luck!

WTF...
Are you meaning it's CRAP??

Well, It's FhG encoder. It might be worse than lame (on high bitrates and VBR), but definitely it isn't crap.

I possibly misread another post then. I thought the encoder included in CoolEdit had been lambasted as being something other than Fraunhoffer and had some serious audio issues like intermitently cutting low frequencies due to bandwidth restrictions. If this isn't the case and the codec does well enough CoolEdit might be a great all in one solution by specifying the output format as MP3 instead of wav.

G

Edit: or the original poster could have been misinformed.

BTW, you can use Peter Pawlovski's MP3 filter plugin for CoolEdit, that uses Lame.dll for both encoding and decoding.

He has other interesting filters, like Vorbis RC3, at the same page.

http://www.blorp.com/~peter/misc.htm

Regards;

Roberto.

Sweet, thanks Roberto. I hadn't known the LAME encoder was available to use with Cool Edit.

@wolfman
you can do that with EAC

choose your prefered settings for the length of the file,
start position in the track, and fade in/out length
EAC -> EAC Options -> Catalog

check Delete WAV after compression
EAC -> Compression Options -> External Compression

select the tracks and start encoding
Action -> Catalog Selected Tracks -> Compressed

the mp3s will have a XING header and a LAME header,
an ID3 Tag v1, and no bad last frame.

you can save the thumbnails as wav-files instead
Action -> Catalog Selected Tracks -> Uncompressed
and encode them using RazorLame.


xox

clever!