Bulk generating silence on multiple mp3 tracks?

[seanppk]

Apologies if this topic has already been covered. I did a search, but couldn't find the right info. More than happy to be corrected though.

I'm new to Audacity and haven't got to grips with the full capabilities, but I came across it when Google searching for a means to add a couple of emtpy seconds to the start of an mp3 track. The problem I have is that my car stereo always clips the start off mp3 tracks, so if I use the Generate > Silence option in Audacity I can add a second or two the start of the track, and it plays properly in the car. What I'm really after though, is a way to perform this same action to a bulk load of tracks at the same time without having to do them individually. Individually editing 6000+ tracks doesn't sound like much fun to me.

Does anyone know how I can go about doing this without losing the will to live?

[kozikowski]

Audacity won't do that for a reason divorced from it not appearing in the Chains command set. Audacity will not edit MP3 files. It converts them internally to a different format and then converts them back when you Export. So the finished files will either be very much larger or sound very much worse -- if you play your cards right, both.

Koz

[seanppk]

Thanks for your reply.

Are you aware if it make a difference if I was working from the original CDs, rather than the impoted mp3s?

[kozikowski]

Chains is not available in Audacity 1.2.

http://audacityteam.org/download/

You can only do things programmed into the Chains tool.

http://manual.audacityteam.org/index.ph ... dit_Chains

Koz

[waxcylinder]

Are you aware if it make a difference if I was working from the original CDs, rather than the impoted mp3s?

Yes it would - as you would be getting lossless adudio files from the CDs (assuming that is that these are normal type CDs and not CDs with MP3s on them).

An avenue you might want to look at is many CD burners give the option to insert a few seconds of silence between tracks (The Red Book standard for CD's is 2 seconds). Many CD burners come with their defaults set to gapless burning - both mine are. Then all you have to do is re-burn a fresh set of CDs - but you'd have to do that anyway if you managed to bulk add a couple of empty seconds to the beginning of the Mp3s (as your original post suggested).

WC