Over the last few days, I registered my copy of MP3 Trimmer. This is an OS X program for making edits to MP3s – splitting, joining, removing portions of them — that does not do a re-encode. This is important, because if you do things like import into Audacity, edit, and then export back to MP3 you are losing quality. There is a reason that when I edit my interviews, I always save them back out as AIFF.
Now that I do the show directly to an MP3 with the Marantz I’ve always avoided like the plague doing an edit to that final product. Besides it being convenient to finish the show and publish it minutes later, I didn’t want to do anything to cause the quality to get crunchy by re-encoding. MP3 Trimmer works by rewriting out entire frames of data without changing them. It might mean that you can’t get the edit exactly on the point where you want it, but that’s a small price to pay.
It’s cheap at $10.95 shareware fee, and is fully operational as a trial, if full of very annoying wait screens. Check it out.