Can anyone recommend a free, basic utility that will allow me to join and trim MP3 files?

There are hundreds of them on the internet, and many of them are old, or won't run on Windows 8.x, or mangle the audio quality, or simply don't work at all.

I mean, all I want to do is grab a minute or so off the end of one MP3 file, stick it on the beginning of a second MP3 file, and then cut off the last three or four minutes of the combined file, all while maintaining original audio quality and not ending up with a header that displays the wrong duration and won't allow seeking.

How hard can it be? Harder than I thought, Ill tell you that.

tanstaafl.

For trimming, I use mp3Trim pro - I've had it for years. It'll also fade in or out.

I don't do it often, but for concatenating I just use the command prompt Copy /B file1 + file2 mergedfile

-jk

Try: http://sourceforge.net/projects/audacity/

opensource and pretty easy to use

For trimming time off of the beginning and end of MP3 files without re-encoding them, I use MP3Trim as already mentioned.



That works, and it's more or less the method I use. But you must remember that it's only successful if:
- Tags have been stripped out of the files first. If you don't do that you might get a "pop" in the audio where there is a tag in place of audio data, or, you'll have the old multiple tag problem.
- The files, if they are VBR, have had the VBR time sequencing tag metadata removed from the file before concatenating them. If you don't do that, then the playback time counter will look wonky on the file, and/or you won't be able to fast forward and rewind the file properly.

Both of those things can be accomplished by TidyMP3. I recommend running that on any files you're expecting to join together with a copy /B command.

Regarding the prior suggestion of Audacity... It is a good audio editor, and it will do these things too. But I think that if you try to do them in Audacity it will mean that the audio data is getting opened in its raw form and thus must be re-compressed again when you re-save it back to a new MP3. For the particular files in question, that might not be a big deal, but as a general practice that's something I try to avoid because it causes additional quality loss.

The advantage to MP3Trim and TidyMP3 is that they simply slice and dice the MP3 file itself on frame boundaries and tag boundaries, without decompressing/recompressing the audio data. So although there might be a small "pop" at the join point, the majority of the data will be identical after all the trimming and editing.

Tank you tony. This is so useful.

That's how I've always done it, and I always used MP3TagStudio for the the file-prep, and for the trimming after concatenating. This time I had bad results -- lots of artifacts, noise, pops, and general degradation after running MP3TS' VBR fix module and removing the tags.

MP3TS has not been updated in years (Magnus seems to have abandoned it) and I suspect that it is not fully compatible with Windows 8.1.

I worked with Audacity and did finally manage to get a decent enough concatenated/trimmed file to send to my friend. But what should have been a 10 minute job (or less) ended up taking about five hours by the time I was done, trying things that didn't work, downloading and installing software, learning enough about Audacity to do the trivial job I was attempting, finding out that Audacity wouldn't save the file until I installed LAME, etc.

Audacity is an interesting program, but it's kind of like swatting mosquitoes with a shotgun -- a bit of overkill for what I was doing. I'll play around with MP3Trim and see what it does.

tanstaafl.

I wonder if you would have had those same problems if you'd run TidyMP3 on the files before concatenating them?