Problem eliminating silence between 2 MP3 files

Special Interest Groups Recording Techniques
1

I’ve got this problem with 2 mp3 files. They are separated by a quite brief silence (about 1sec) which I would like to eliminate, so that the second file starts playing immediately after the first. Just to give some real life meaning to this, the two files are the 3rd and 4th movements of Beethoven’s 5th symphony, which anybody familiar with this work would know that the last movement follows immediately on the previous one with no silence between them.

I had a look in the wiki and tried to join the two files and then put a label in the 4th movement to separate them conceptually but not physically (if you know what I mean). But this doesn’t seem to work.

According to eye3D (a linux ID3-tag editor, people here probably know about), the files are MPEG1, Layer III [ ~226 kb/s @ 44100 Hz - Joint stereo ]. This doesn’t mean a whole lot to me but I would like to retain this bitrate on export. I understand the default bitrate is 128 and, apparently, the bitrate can be changed before LAME is evoked. I could be way at sea on this stuff so please bear with me.

My version of Audacity is 1.3.7 and the OS is Ubuntu 9.04.

Any pointers on how I should proceed would be much appreciated, TIA

2

WAV is the production format, MP3 is the delivery format. They don’t cross well.

MP3 is produced in frames not continuous music like WAV or equivalent, so producing split second timing isn’t possible.

Koz

3

In Audacity 1.3 you can select the bitrate by clicking on the “Options” button in the Export dialogue screen.

Further to Koz’s comments, MP3s always have a short gap at the beginning (limitation of the format). However this is usually a small fraction of a second. If the gap is, as you say, considerably longer than this, then the gap is probably also due to your media player taking a bit of time to move onto the next file (from the 3rd to 4th movements). The only way to eliminate this (with the MP3 format) will be to combine the two movements into one track.

Some MP3 players have the ability to run playlists (a list of MP3 files) and automatically adjust the start time so that they play seamlessly, but that is a matter for the player not for the files themselves.