I recently recorded something in MP3 — I should have done FLAC, but it’s way too late — and I wanted to edit those soundtracks from 5 minutes to about 2 minutes each. I edit in Audacity. Will loading it, removing about half the track, and exporting again to MP3 harm the quality?
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1Related: superuser.com/questions/409238/… – rob Mar 10 '15 at 5:32
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always keep your recordings in uncompressed or lossless formats: e.g. wav, flac, etc. and encode for publishing. – Uğur Gümüşhan Apr 1 '15 at 7:05
Yes. MP3 is lossy so if you re-encode the new file to MP3 with Audacity/LAME, you will lose quality. But if you output the cropped file using a lossless codec such as FLAC, the quality should be no worse than the imported MP3.
Some other tools allow you to crop MP3 tracks without re-encoding, such as mp3splt and mp3DirectCut. See How do I split an MP3 file without re-encoding it?
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2Alternative to what? mp3splt and mp3DirectCut from the linked question are both available for multiple platforms, including Linux and Windows--as is Audacity. – rob Mar 10 '15 at 5:31
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Looking at the picture I thought it was a windows program but now I see its an old LXDE theme or something from knoppix. Thanks – Nick Bailuc Mar 10 '15 at 5:52
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