The thing about mp3's is, they sound pretty good until you play them side by side with the original CD (rip to a 44/16 .wav to make comparison easy), and THEN you start to notice the artifacts, and loss of stereo detail. And, unfortunately, the better the speakers, the more you notice it.

For public presentation, I generally hate to play anything encoded at less that 256k, but Apple lossless codec is best if you can spare the room on the HD (plus it drains the battery faster, so use a dock).

We spend a fortune on getting the best arranger we possibly can, and a very high fidelity PA to play it through. Why short-change the audience at break-time?

Using Apple Lossless, you can still get about 150 whole albums on a 40GB iPod... That ought to be enough..!

Hi,

one of the best FREEWARE used to edit audio data (including mp3 - with the addition of the free LAME encoder/decoder) is Audacity.

It's open source, available for different platforms (win, mac, linux) and works fine.
In their site there are dedicated downloading pages, including the above mentioned Lame encoder/decoder (+ instructions how to install), plug-ins, etc.

Regarding editing a mp3: there are some editing possible without decoding/editing/encoding procedures: two I knows are:
- removing silence from beginning and ending of the song (but this is removing packets of data, so you cannot be "sample" precise, you can work with approximation).
- changing the overall volume (this is made adding/subtracting values from the encoded data).

Anyway most of editing procedures requires decoding to linear format (wav, aiff), editing and encoding (that means loosing some quality).

Hope this help.

Regards.

Here's what I wound up with... mp3DirectCut
http://mpesch3.de1.cc/mp3dc.html

It's freeware, small (169kb), easy to use, will slice/dice mp3 files without re-compression, therefore no quality loss. Also fades, normalize, and gain adjustments. Highly recommended for what it does.

Glenn

Thanks Glenn I just tried this little program and it's great.

I like MP3 DirectCut for what it does. I have also found and been using WavePad. When initially downloaded you will get the full version. If you decide not to buy the full version, it will block some of the more advanced features. You will still be able to use cut/paste, EQ, Amplify, Trim and a number of other features.

It's worth a look and a little experimentation at no cost.
Eddie