Delete beginning of multiple files

[healey.cj]

Hey,

I'm wondering if there is a way to batch delete the first 1-2 seconds of a heap of audio files?

I have a heap of mp3 files of individual piano tones and I want to get rid of the attack and just have the sustained tone. (Don't ask why, long story haha).

I don't know if Audacity has this sort of functionality, I doubt it does, but if anyone knows a way, please let me know! I really don't want to have to do it manually.

Cheers!

[kozikowski]

you can probably force it to work, but you almost certainly won't want to.

Audacity doesn't edit MP3. It converts MP3 into a very high quality internal format and then edits that. The problem comes when you make a new MP3 at the end. The bubbly, honky compression damage doubles, so you can never go back to the same tiny size sound files that you had at the beginning.

We send the Windows people to MP3SPLT for simple editing like this, but I don't know what's available for Macs.

Koz

[steve]

There's a plug-in available for trimming the start/end of files, but it may not produce the result that you want.

As well as the sound quality loss that Koz mentioned, one of the limitations of the MP3 format is that MP3s always have a small bit of silence at the beginning, so you can never get an immediate start, and looping MP3s have a noticeable gap each time they loop back to the beginning.

Also. to automatically remove the start of the file, do you need to remove exactly the same amount (in seconds) from each file?