Hi all,

I'm working on a .Net music portal project for a client and as part of that I've been tasked with finding a way to create a 30 second sample (plus 10 second fade) of an MP3... so I'm looking for a suitable DLL or SDK to use.

Has any one else done anything like this and if so, what did they use to do it?

Hope someone can help - for once Google isn't turning much up!

Mike

You can use one of those LAME compiles 3.90.3 (only with --alt-presets support) or 3.96.1 (also only with --alt-presets support) or 3.90.3 modified or 3.96.1 stable. Please read the enclosed readme's to determine how each one works.

Thanks for that - it looks promising. I don't understand why I have 4 versions to choose from though - can you give me a quick overview as to why each one is different. Shouldn't I just use the latest one?

(Sorry if these are dumb Q's - I encode loads of MP3's via LAME and AudioGrabber but I've delved into LAME itself much to be honest.)

TIA...

Mike

PS: Love your evil-looking black disco ball!!

Well, It's up to you. F.A.Q. may help you - you should find there everything you want to know AFAIK. The only difference is that the first two support only --alt-presets so you can't use other switches.

Well, to be honest I can't see how I can use LAME to do this... I downloaded 3.90.3mod and 3.96.1 and read through the options for both then looked at the FAQs on this site without getting too many answers. Although I can see that I can use am MP3 as input I can not see any options that let me either specify the output length in time or add a fade... if I'm missing something here I'd appreciate if someone could offer some help or suggestions.

TIA...

Mike

mp3DirectCut can cut and fade MP3.
But perhaps not what you want, this is not a DLL or SDK.

Thanks for that - but yes, it *has* to be a DLL or an SDK as this has to happen behind the scenes as new tracks are uploaded to the site.

Thanks for the thought anyway!

Mike

What format are the full clips (i.e.: the samples from which you wish to create samples) in?

It seems to me that you are most likely going to have to wrap some existing EXEs to do what you want, if you don't have the skills to manipulate WAV files from .NET (which I don't).

I can't see a problem taking your source, converting it to WAV (if required), creating a 30/40 second sample, and (re)encoding to MP3... but I don't have any ideas about the 10 second fade... yet.

Yes! That's exactly what I thought but I don't know which DLL is able to do the job you want to achieve...

Well, the way I've got around it for now (just to get us to our go-live date) is to use Flash to stream the track. I found an excellent tutorial on using sounds in Flash so cobbled together a Flash player that streams for 30 seconds then fades out over 10 seconds... wasn't hard to write, especially since I had no prior Flash experience.

I'd still like to be able to make sample tracks though so if anyone else has some really concrete ideas or knows of a DLL or SDK to do this please post here or PM me.

Cheers for all the help - I'll keep my eye on this thread for any further activity.

Mike.