Lossless "save as" after deleting intervals from *.mp3?

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mattad
Posts: 49
Joined: Wed Jun 28, 2006 10:24 am

Lossless "save as" after deleting intervals from *.mp3?

Post by mattad »

Assume I loaded a *.mp3 file into Goldwave and deleted some part from it.
Now I want to save the remaining part and click on menu

File--->Save as...

Is the remaining stuff saved LOSSLESS?
or is re-encoding always performed?

Second question:

Assume I marked a certain interval from a loaded *.mp3 file. Now I want to save just this interval (!) as (lossless) new *.mp3 file.

How can I achieve this?

As far as I found out ALWAYS the full current audio is saved and not just the interval.
DougDbug
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Joined: Wed Feb 16, 2005 3:33 pm
Location: Silicon Valley

Re: Lossless "save as" after deleting intervals from *.mp3?

Post by DougDbug »

MP3 is lossy. If you save as WAV or FLAC it's lossless. That is, there is no additional loss.

When you open a file in any "regular" audio editor it gets decompressed. If you save it in a lossy format you are going through another generation of lossy compression and the "damage" does accumulate (to some extent). AAC was designed to be more-immune to multiple generations of compression than MP3, but I'm not sure that's true if you transcode from MP3 to AAC.

mp3DirectCut can do some limited editing without decompressing. It should work for what you're doing. (I can't help you with it because I've only used it a couple of times, and I find it a bit awkward.)

If you're not hearing a difference it's OK... ;) Ideally, you should compress ONCE as the last production step (if you want to use lossy compression). But sometimes we don't have a choice, and that case we can only minimize the number of times it's re-compressed, and possibly we can use a high-quality (high bitrate) setting.

As far as I found out ALWAYS the full current audio is saved and not just the interval.
Save Selection As will do it. Or you can Edit - Trim to delete everything that's not selected. Or, you can select the parts you want to remove and Edit -> Cut, or just hit the Del key on your keyboard.
GoldWave Inc.
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Re: Lossless "save as" after deleting intervals from *.mp3?

Post by GoldWave Inc. »

To save the selection only, use File | Save Selection As or Edit | Copy To.

Saving an MP3 as MP3 will cause some loss of quality. You can save as Wave or FLAC to avoid that. Otherwise you'd have to use specialized software that support working with raw MP3 blocks.
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