Can you please recommend an easy to use music trimmer?

FartsUnited@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 53 points –

I ripped a mixcloud stream using a great free MediaHuman app (Youtube to Mp3). I now need to rip the desired 6 minute song (in m4a format) from a 2 hour stream. The trouble is: I can't seem to find a decent app to do it.

I tried using a couple of online apps but the file was too large to upload, and I can't seem to find a decent app to use for my iMac anymore.

Do you know of an easy-to-use and/or free music trimmer/cutter app?

thanks

45

Audacity?

Spyware after v 3.0.3. Tenacity is the prevailing fork without telemetry. Needs work but works ok.

Really? The audacity on these guys!

If this was reddit, I would have given you a trophy.

Didn't they remove those?

Yeah, now they're doing some stupid shit with upvotes themselves. I have no idea, I'm still using Boost and old.reddit.com when I need to find something on there.

That's an over-exaggeration - the telemetry in Audacity is literally just opt-in error reporting, and the server is self-hosted by the developer. Source

thanks, I tried using Audacity but I got an 'incompatible plugin' error message.

Probably need to convert it to a lossless format first with another tool. Try reading up on VLC or ffmpeg format conversions. Extract the audio and convert it to wav. Then try to slice out the section you want with audacity. Once you have the trimmed section you can use VLC or ffmpeg to convert it to whatever audio format you want.

Just to clarify some points to give the correct advice

  • The downloaded file is an mp3?
  • You need the trimmed song to be in m4a?

If that positive for both, then some form of transcoding is inevitable, and since mp3 is a lossy format, and m4a is normally a lossy format as well, you might encounter some quality loss depending on how high the mp3 bitrate is compared to the m4a. You can select an higher bitrate for the m4a, but you'll never achieve an higher quality than what the mp3 contained. For that situation, a relatively easy and visual software to do so would be Audacity.

If you are able to keep the trimmed song as an mp3, then there are some utilities like mptrim that pick the portion of audio you want without retranscoding, which avoid degrading the signal.

Audacity has telemetry; Tenacity is a fork without it.

Source: I'm just learning this elsewhere in this thread.

https://www.audacityteam.org/desktop-privacy-notice

It only sends the following during the update process, which can be disabled during the software install: Audacity version, OS name and version, country of IP address.

If there is a serious error it will let you generate an error report to help them debug the issue, and will not send anything without the user's consent. Seems reasonable to me.

Mp3trim it's old as fuck runs on windows.. if it's never failed me. Still being updated too!! https://www.mptrim.com/

MP3DirectCut - https://mpesch3.de/ - might also suit. I use it a lot for community radio stuff as it doesn't have to pre-load the entire file, making extracting interviews from the MP3 log files a very quick process. Cue the file, B for begin, N for end, File, Save selection, done.

Use ffmpeg to trim it first and then convert: example of trimming

I know command line can be off putting, but you really just look up examples and mess around with them. Make a copy of the file before you start trimming

inb4 ffmpeg

Is that not the right answer though? It can do timestamps or offsets for audio cropping without re-encoding. He's on lemmy, cli can't be that scary

Unless you're looking for a wave-profile marker, in which case Tenacity/Audacity would help.

I agree its the best (basically AV swiss army knife) but plenty of people on here aren't very technically competent if you look at the questions coming in.

Never a bad time to start though!

Lossless Cut FOSS, Crossplatform frontend for ffmpeg. Note that to do it losslessly, it will still be in mp3. If you need to transcode you can do that too, but like others have said you'll probably lose quality.

Audacity before it became spyware. Shotcut is FOSS and cross platform, it's for videos but it will also work for trimming audio.

Wait, what happened to Audacity? 😬

Some company bought it and they're collecting "anonymous" data. But since it's open source you just get one of its forks.

I thought it was just sending basic info for the sake of troubleshooting and bug fixes? Was that not the case?

That's what they say, but I prefer to not send any info if I can.