I am using Windows 7, 64 bit, and installed Audacity from the .exe installer.
I wrote about 20 songs. A friend of mine copied them from an audio cassette I gave him and converted them to a DVD file using some kind of software converter program, I don’t know what it was. He brought me that file (about one hour and 38 minutes long) on a thumb drive and loaded it into my computer. Using some audio converter program that wasn’t Audacity I converted that file into a MP3 file. Once I then downloaded and installed Audacity on my computer, I tried to select his MP3 file to open in Audacity so I could make a copy of each of the 20 individual songs in that file. Audacity would play the file, but it wouldn’t let me select any individual file to copy.
Can someone please help me figure out how I can select each individual file and make a copy of each individual file? Thank you very much for any help you’re willing to provide. I just want to end up with 20 individual MP3 files instead of one big MP3 file.
If anyone on this board lives in St. Louis, Missouri, I’d gladly pay to have you come over to my apartment and fix the problem directly on my computer.
Either way, thanks again for any help anyone can provide.
I’m in Los Angeles. I’ll see how much gas/petrol I have.
I’m going to try and talk you out of using Audacity. Audacity does not edit MP3 files. It converts MP3 into a very high quality internal format and then makes a whole new MP3 when it’s done. The down side of doing that is the sound damage always goes up a little – sometimes a lot.
Given you’re only wacking up a single MP3 into pieces, you’d be far better off with one of the pure MP3 editors like MP3splt.
I hope you still have the file from the thumb drive, because, if you load the mp3 file into audacity, it is converted to wav and on export back to mp3 (if you wish so).
What format has the big file? A lot of formats can be imported into Audacity if fmpeg is installed.
Otherwise, the quality gets poorer and poorer with every conversion.
The separation of the tracks won’t be a great deal after importing the track with the highest quality available.
Thanks very much for your help. I’m glad MP3splt has a Graphical User Interface available. I’d never try to use a command line interface for any program!
I’m going to download the program today and see if I can end up with my 20 tunes each as a separate tune and given a separate title by me. If I have problems, I’ll post here again and hope you’ll help me again.
If/when I end up with my 20 separate tunes, I have another question. I really liked the audio quality of how my tunes sounded when played on Audacity, even though I couldn’t get them separated out. I think they sounded so good because it seems Audacity defaults to very high quality audio recording settings. Are there ways I can set MP3splt to similarly be set to very high quality audio recording settings before I separate out my 20 tunes using MP3splt?
Thanks very much for your help. The big file is in the IrfanView MP3 format. Are you saying I can’t load that file into Audacity without converting it to a .wav file? I certainly don’t want to do that for the reasons you mention.
Obviously we only provide support for Audacity, strictly speaking (we don’t make any other programs). Please try to look at the mp3splt documentation before asking here for help: mp3splt project - documentation page .
You don’t want to record in MP3splt, just divide the long file into 20 pieces. MP3splt just chops the file up, unlike Audacity which takes the MP3, decompresses a copy of it to lossless PCM (so it is suitable for using effects like changing the equalization) and so then has to rewrite (export) the MP3 afterwards when you want to save the MP3 for your computer.
If you rewrite the MP3 like Audacity does then there are quality settings to be made when you write the file.
If you just chop the existing MP3 file into pieces then there are no quality settings.
There are other programs you can use too to directly chop the original MP3, like MP3DIrectCut: http://mpesch3.de1.cc/ .
See above. Audacity does not convert the MP3 or even touch it when you bring the MP3 into Audacity, but makes a copy of the MP3 data and decompresses it to PCM. PCM is like WAV in quality, but Audacity is not writing a WAV file that you can get at when you import the file.
Decompressing a lossy format like MP3 to PCM is (to oversimplify) a lossless process because PCM is a lossless format.
However decompressing MP3 to PCM does not improve the quality, just means it does not get any worse.
I’ve been hoping that the big file was a lossless format (since you’ve mentioned a DVD format).
You’ve obviously written the songs yourself, so it would be nice to have the tape archived in a lossless format, where from you always start to encode into the momentarily fashionable formats.
You’ve mentioned a mp3 conversion from the IfanView format. I wonder if this was an actual conversion or a simply extraction of the audio track.
In the first case, it would be favourable to convert to a lossless format, which could be opened in Audacity and additionally stored as a project file. In the second case, the separation with mp3Split would be the best we could do.
It really depends on what the final result is for, i.e. if you want to preserve the songs or distribute them in some way.