Short silence in the beginning when exporting to mp3

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

Hello

When I export a wav-file to mp3 the program is inserting a short silence in the beginning of the track. Why? I have
tried to delete and then save the file. But when i open the file again the short silence is there again.

Is it possible to make some adjustments in the preferences so it won’t come back, or is there another way to make it
go away?

I am using:
Windows XP with SP3
Audacity 2.0.0 (.exe)

Does anyone have an answer?
Peter

2

It’s a limitation of the MP3 format. MP3 files always start with a short amount of “padding”.
To avoid the problem, use a different format such as WAV, Flac or Ogg.

3

Like Steve wrote, it’s in the mp3 format.

There’s a historical reason for that. Older CD players can’t play a CD that has no silence between tracks. A workaround used to be that the player itself inserted a <1 sec break between each track, but the consumer doesn’t like that. When the mp3 format was developed, it was decided that for this consumer format, a short silence at the beginning of each track was needed because CD burning programs would otherwise enable consumers to burn gapless CD’s.

It’s a non-problem, really, cause these older CD players couldn’t read CDR’s anyway. I’ve never encountered one. That doesn’t mean these don’t exist, but they are at least rare, IMHO.

But even some simple software players couldn’t cope with gapless. And since mp3 is a consumer format, many helpdesks will applaud this decision.

These days the average software player can compensate (and will not even inform the user) and will play gapless or cross-faded without any problem.

And since you need wavs to burn CD’s, there’s no reason to export to mp3 to burn CD’s.

4

Thanks!

Peter

5

Would it not be more correct to say the above is a side effect of why MP3s have padding at the start, and not the reason? http://lame.sourceforge.net/tech-FAQ.txt


Gale

6

Which of the above? CD-players or software players?

7

And then there’s MP3s heritage. It’s full name is MPEG 1, Layer III, a video format. It likes working in even frames.

Never do production in MP3.

Koz