Creative Grease: Stains on the Driveway of Hot Glue Media

Combining mp3′s without re-encoding

You know what I hate? When you’re sitting at your computer, making audio, and you’ve got some mp3′s and you don’t have any original lossless format versions of them and all you want to do is stick them together end-to-end in one file, but you don’t want to use your audio editor to do it because that would mean you would have to re-encode those mp3′s and that would decrease the fidelity of the final result and possibly introduce nasty artifacts into your sound because it’s a lossy format and you just want to make a nifty soundtrack for your latest lolcat video on youtube and you don’t want it to sound like crap.

Hate that.

Yes, you can use an audio editing program like Audacity to open your mp3′s, edit them together, then export a single file, and the sound won’t be all that much worse and just live with the results, or you can use a program that will join the mp3′s together without the encoding step. If you do a google search you’ll find quite a few programs do this, but I’m partial to the shareware program MP3 Splitter & Joiner, only because it got me out of a bind the other day.

Keep in mind, programs like these aren’t for anything complicated, but when you spend lots of time in headphones like I do, you’ll appreciate just how frequently you have to do simple end-to-end edits like this, and little applications like this will save you time. Not much time, but some. It adds up. Really.

Mer made this mess on December 31st, 2009 and filed it under Audio