Hi Everyone:
I have a two part question:
1- is there a way in audacity to select the silent section of the track? I did not see anything on this.
2- is there anyway of counting the number of samples in the selection? Or do I have to actually count them myself one by one? I hope there is a command.
Thank you.
There’s not exactly those functions, but several similar ones. What exactly are you wanting to do?
Thank you for your reply steve. On a previous post I was asking questions on how to create seamless, gapless MP3 files, and you sent me the link http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Gapless. in that article, it mentiones to count the number of samples in the padding and encoder delay of the file. So, I am trying to get this information for the silence section at the beginning and end of each track and make adjustments per the article. That is why I wanted to see if there is a way to count the number of samples. Thanks for your help. I would appreciate all suggestions.
Just change the display format in the Selection Toolbar (normally at the bottom of the Window) and change the display format to Samples - see http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/audacity_selection.html#Selection_Toolbar
Then when you make a selection Audacity will do the counting for you.
WC
But after counting the samples, don’t export the files again or the gap will change.
You will need to import the MP3 files, count the samples, then close the project without saving so that you know the gap length of the files that you have imported and not changed them.
Thank you. This helps a lot.
Thank you Steve again. I assume when you say “don’t export the files again or the gap will change”, you mean I should not recreate the MP3 file? I should open the file in Audacity, get the information, and simply close it without saving anything. Then go to foobar and make the changes. Did I understand you correctly? Thanks.
Exactly 
Thanks Steve. One other thing, about these delays and paddings. I have two tracks with the following starting and stopping samples (as reported from Audacity):
track 1: Start=576 End of track=11,548,799 length of track= 11,548,223
track 2: Start=1181 End of track=10,225,151 length of track= 10,223,970
In foobar, when I go to input the MP3 gapless playback info, I get:
track 1: Encoder delay=576 desired length of track=11,546,791
track 2: Encoder delay=576 desired length of track=10,223,763
Can you please help me to see what values to put for the delay and desired length of track to get a true gapless sets of tracks. Thanks for all your help.
track 1: Start=576 End of track=11,548,799 length of track= 11,548,223
track 2: Start=1181 End of track=10,225,151 length of track= 10,223,970…Can you please help me to see what values to put for the delay and desired length of track to get a true gapless sets of tracks.
It looks like you’ve selected the audio starting at the end of the gap. So, your gap information should be 576 & 1181.
On a previous post I was asking questions on how to create seamless, gapless MP3 files…
I took a look at your previous post, and you said you were making an MP3 CD for your car… There is a good chance that your car stereo won’t read the gap information and simply won’t play gaplessly. 
If your player doesn’t support gapless MP3 playbqack, maybe it supports AAC or WMA. As far as I know, these formats don’t suffer from the gap problem.
Thank you DVDDoug. After trying everything that I could for two days, I came to the conclusion that even though the task seems relatively easy, the feature that I am looking at is not possible.
My car stereo only plays MP3 and regular CDA files. CDA is good and the tracks play continuously gapless, but each CD can only be 80 minutes. So compacting several CD’s into one would not work. For a while I thought that Foobar has trick to fit more than 80 minutes on a CD, but I was wrong.
On the other hand, MP3 is good in the sense that I can fit many albums on a single CD, but it is horrible for gapless music such as live music. As the song goes from one track to the next, the player has to read the new file, and there is a rather long pause. So there is no flow.
I am just amazed that with the technology that we have, this simple task cannot be done. Oh well! Finally, I have decided rather than burn CD’s, to put all the files on my iphone and go in that direction. Of course, I have not tried this yet, but from what I read on the web, itunes should produce gapless music. So, hopefully this will work. I would like to thank all of your for all your help and suggestions. I guess I will close this thread.
AAC and WMA (at least the lossy versions) have a similar but less extreme lead in at the start.
iTunes should detect and not play the gaps in the files, on an iPhone or on a Windows or Mac computer.
Gale