mp3DirectCut - records and edits directly in MP3 format

[harvey]

mp3DirectCut - records and edits directly in MP3 format (Windows)

April 27 - Second thoughts.

Based on the dismal experience described in the next paragraph, I
cannot recommend mp3DirectCut as a primary recording and editing
program, although I do intend to continue using it to cut out longer
segments, such as missed repetitions.

Today, I made a new recording, using mp3DirectCut in order to evaluate
it further. And almost immediately ran into trouble as I started to
edit. As reported in a post below, I got satisfactory results from
cutting out repeated sections, which were all at least several seconds
long. However, the trouble came when I cut out snippets only a
fraction of a second long: that all-too often introduced audible
artifacts, sort of a hollow-sounding blip. Then disaster fell as I
tried to silence the blips: somehow the amplitude adjustment was
applied to about a minute of the file, and what I take to be the undo
function didn't work, so I lost that minute of the recording. Also,
because the play-back cursor position is independent from the
highlighted selection (as reported in the post below), trying to
select small sections of the audio was very painful since I'm used to
being able to replay the same section repeatedly with a simple
operation of the mouse (or in the case of Cool Edit, to control play,
stop, and replay with the space bar) as I listen to fine-tune the
boundaries of the selection.



(original content of this post follows)

(edited April 26: added details; corrected one mistake)

This is exciting. Stephan has recommended mp3DirectCut for editing
MP3 files directly, in terms of cutting and pasting. I had suggested
Total Recorder for this same purpose (since it also records).

Today, I tried mp3DirectCut for the first time, learning in the process
that it also records directly to MP3 format.

*What!? A recording tool and MP3 editor all-in-one? That sounds too
good to be true.*

But, yes, it's true. I am favorably impressed after my initial
experimenting with the program. It has a graphical editor, which
works similarly to Audacity and Audition/Cool Edit in terms of
selecting a section of the audio (and works much better than Total
Record's graphical editor).

The user manual -- an HTML file -- seems pretty decent. The user
interface is configurable for a number of different languages, including
English. The program has one feature I wish Cool Edit had: with a
section of the audio selected, say, for deletion, there are buttons which
allow you to listen to your choice of the 2 seconds before or after the
start or end of the selection, useful for adjusting the boundaries of the
selected range.

The interface has a few quirks. For example, I had to read the manual
to figure out how to record. Actually, it's rather like recording with many
tape recorders where you have to hold down the Record button and then
push the Play button. In mp3DirectCut, the Rec button puts the program
in monitor mode, which activates the VU meter (the input volume level
indicator), so you can get the volume level set correctly before you start
recording. When you're ready, you next click the Play button, and then
you're off and recording.

One drawback is that it supports creating and editing only version 1
ID3 tags. But there are tag editors for that purpose. Also, it appears
to have almost no signal processing or filters, such as noise reduction,
although it does do standard peak normalization. Also, it can adjust the
amplitude (Edit > Gain...) of a selection, including a "Silence" button
on the Gain dialog.

And, finally, as is dear to the hearts of most volunteers here, it's free.

Based on this preliminary investigation, mp3DirectCut looks like a
very good option, especially for newbies without prior recording and
editing experience, as recording software for LibriVox.

http://www.mpesch3.de


Technical notes:

OS: Windows (9x/NT/2K/XP), Linux (with Wine)

There is some one-time configuration necessary for program operation,
including for recording, as described in the user manual.

For recording, it needs the LAME encoder (just like Audacity needs it
for exporting to MP3 format). mp3DirectCut requires its program
executable and the file lame_enc.dll be in the same folder/directory.

It is very small. The installer is 162 KB (much of that is the files
for the GUI language support) and the executable 51 KB. In contrast,
the installer for Cool Edit 2000 is 8.2 MB and 2.1 MB for Audacity.

[Peter Why]

Thanks for that, Harvey,

I'll have a look and report back. Let's see if it can beat Audacity's noise reduction !

Peter

[harvey]

Thanks for that, Harvey,

I'll have a look and report back. Let's see if it can beat Audacity's noise reduction !

Peter, you're welcome.

I thought about mentioning that it doesn't appear to have noise reduction;
now it seems I should have. mp3DirectCut is not a full-featured editor like
Audacity or Audition/Cool Edit. From the perspective of LibriVox, its chief
features of interest are that it can record directly to MP3 and it can edit
in terms of cutting out unwanted sections (ie, repeats), working directly
on MP3 files.

It has other features, most of which won't be useful for LibriVox, such as
applying fade-in or fade-out.

[Peter Why]

Oh, well, the noise reduction's not too important when the recording system is working well.

I *do* tend to use Audacity's fade in and out, and it's surprisingly effective, when I'm making very minor edits, for example, to soften the end of a word after removing a single syllable or sound.

I'll play with the software this weekend.

Peter

[harvey]

I *do* tend to use Audacity's fade in and out, and it's surprisingly
effective, when I'm making very minor edits, for example, to soften
the end of a word after removing a single syllable or sound.

As a recovering perfectionist, I wish you hadn't said that (:-)
for I already spend what seems like too much time and effort tweaking
my recordings.

Part of that is using the "silence transform" in Cool Edit to blank out
ambient noises during gaps when I don't want to change the timing
that's part of phrasing (ie, whatever is selected is replaced with the
same length of silence). The chief culprit is when I inhale for
breath; often that can be heard in the recording. I noticed that
mp3DirectCut's Gain dialog has a Silence button that does the same
thing.

Actually, I'm surprised it hadn't occurred to me to fade the abrupt
effects of cuts like you do, since I do that routinely in another
venue. I regularly record music from a radio broadcast that cross
fades between songs. I chop the recordings into separate tracks,
and I don't want any of the cross fade; therefore, I often need to
apply a fade to the ends (humorously, it's sometimes difficult to tell
where the songs transition, since I'm not certain if the section in
question is an intro to the next song or a coda at the end of the
previous song.) Recently, it did occur to me to try Cool Edit's noise
reduction filter to remove the cross fade, so I don't lose the intro
or the end of a song. I've been pleasantly surprised by how well it
has work, although it depends on the nature of the music I'm treating
as the "noise" to be removed, so it sometimes doesn't work at all.

I'll play with the software this weekend.

I'm interested in what you think.

After playing with it some more since yesterday, I'll try using it
for some real production work. I have two files from a work in the
LibriVox catalog which have repeated phrases I want to remove.
And I'm thinking about using it for my next recording.

[earthcalling]

The chief culprit is when I inhale for breath; often that can be heard in the recording.

I hadn't thought of editing those out. In fact, I tend to deliberately leave them in; when editing out a chunk, I'll start the new chunk just before the breath in. Seems to me it makes the reading appear to flow, or at least as if it hadn't been edited.

Or maybe I'm just being odd? (And still new to all this?)

David

[Fox in the Stars]

The one thing I dink with is that I'll nip out every mouth pop I can get hold of, and will sit there moving the edges of selections a few pixels at a time to find the ones I can't see on the waveform... Usually I can only get them in the silences. I'll try in the words sometimes but usually it does more harm than good.

[JickBahTech]

Breathing I leave alone, as I find that if you go to long without hearing a breath it starts to sound unnatural (kinda like how whenever someone has to swim in a movie you can feel the audience try to hold its breath).

However, Lip smacking drives me CRAZY , and must be exterminated whenever possible!

Just my take

[harvey]

Survey of breathing / inhaling in LibriVox and commercial audio books

(file under: information you'd probably rather not know)

For what it's worth, I just sampled eight readers (seven are professional
actors or readers; the eighth I don't know about) from my collection
of commercial audio books, listening for sounds of inhaling. The result
is weighted more towards the absence of this "noise". From four readers,
I heard little-to-no breathing; the others are moderate-to-heavy breathers.

Next, I sampled six LibriVox readers (not including myself). Four were
from novel-length solo works; the remaining two from a collaborative work.
The sound of inhaling was virtually absent from all six recordings.

Whether the sound of inhaling adds to or detracts from a recording depends,
like other issues discussed here, on the listener's ears ... and on breather's
nose (or mouth (:-)

[harvey]

Report on removing repeated sections with mp3DirectCut

Getting this thread back on subject (:-) ... as mentioned above and in
another forum, I have encountered five files (in roughly five plus
two halves novels from the catalog) which contain repeated sections
that were missed during editing and proof-listening. Since I find
repetitions not quite as distracting as JickBahTech says above he
finds lip-smacking, I like to remove the repeats.

I'd already done this for two files from one work, but have been
putting off doing it for the three files from another. The reason for
the foot-dragging is that it's a mildly cumbersome and time-consuming
process using Total Record (Standard Edition).

So I'm pleased to report that I find it a rather easier process with
mp3DirectCut. This means no more procrastination. And it means I
will be switching from Total Recorder, which I've happily used for
several years, to mp3DirectCut when I want to cut sections out of an
MP3 file.

The main two recording and editing programs I use are Cool Edit 2000
(ancestor of Audition) and Total Recorder. My experience with
Audacity is limited to some testing and exploration related to
LibriVox. I have never liked the way Audacity displays the wave form.
While it's unusual when compared to Cool Edit or Audacity, so far, I
prefer mp3DirectCut's graphical depiction of the wave form to that of
Audacity.

This is not to say there is no room for improvement in the program.

The first item annoyed me initially because it's so different from
Audacity and Cool Edit. In those programs, clicking with the mouse on
the graph of the audio "wave form" also sets the cursor position for
play back. In mp3DirectCut, the play-back cursor and the selected
region are independent. Moving cursor appears to be a two step
process: click on the wave form where you want the cursor to be; this
actually sets the boundary for selecting a section of the audio, but
does not move the play-back cursor. Then you click one of two buttons
for moving the cursor to either the beginning or end of the selection.

The main thing that, while I'm getting used to it, I don't like is
that when you move the play-back cursor to one end of the selected
region, the wave form is shifted in order to center the cursor in the
window. I'd prefer the wave form be left where it's positioned if the
end of the region you're moving the cursor to is already visible.

One good feature is that you can select a segment to be deleted and
then "pre-listen" to what it will sound like without the segment, but
before you actually delete it. That is, you can preview the edit
before removing the segment. I find the 4-second preview to be too
short; I'd find it easier to judge the effect with a longer preview.
The issue here how much gap to leave after the cut; you don't want it
either too abrupt or too long.

One last item on my wish list is a way to play just the highlighted
selection and then stop. Both Cool Edit and Total Record do this; I
don't know about Audacity.

All these "problems" are things the developer of mp3DirectCut could do
to enhance this useful program.

[hugh]

sorry about the hijacking... someone (not me) moved the breathing stuff elsewhere! tho actually that is a serious topic... ie what LV recordings "should" sound like.

[Peter Why]

Harvey, I've got used to Audacity's display and rather like it (though I don't understand what it is displaying), and find it helpful when zooming in to do micro-editing.

... and, yes, if you highlight a section of recording and click Play, Audacity does just play that section. This can be a minor irritation where, if you're a little careless about clicking on the display to place the cursor, and actually drag for a fraction, you get a very small highlit section ... which is all that plays when you click Play.

... and in relation to fading; in a recent recording I did, I had recorded a number of danish words, but later asked for advice about pronunciation. There's a town called Viborg. I found that my original pronunciation was reasonably close, except that the "g" wasn't pronounced. So, rather than re-record each sentence which had the word in it, I was able to get away with cutting the "g" and fading the end of the remaining word. Not perfect, but acceptable .. and probably sounds better than re-recording.

Peter

Peter

[Stephan]

mp3directcuts function to prelisten a cut, before and after the cut, is really hard to beat for the editing and i miss it in "goldwave"

I find mp3directcut is best for slicing long recordings into a sequence of smaller mp3 files....for digital recordings of your 45s or long radio-rips. You can mark the slices, or make a cuesheet to cut on, or even let it search for gaps and auto-cue the file and slice the file according to this automatical marking. I think thats what mp3directcut is build for. So its not 100% streamlined for our purpose.

I have gone back to GoldWave for editing (the shareware-version is limited to a number of clicks. Save work, close and re-open to go on with the editing.)

• in addition to copy&paste you got the wonderfull replace function and the clever replacing record function
• the good set of filters, a REALLY good noise-filter
• the waveform is displayed in vectorform not with voxels, so you can zoom in on the waveform like a microscope
• there you can DRAW/PAINT (!) the waveform to iron out little jumps that would result in clicks.

[harvey]

Stephan,

>mp3directcuts function to prelisten a cut, before and after the cut,
>is really hard to beat for the editing and i miss it in "goldwave"

It's essential in mp3DirectCut since that program doesn't seem to have
an undo function. In Cool Edit, with multiple levels of undo, it's a
simple matter to cut; listen; and, if you don't like the effect, undo.
What you cut is then restored and is also selected, making it easy to
tweak the boundaries. That's by way of saying, for myself, I won't
miss the cut pre-listen.

Now, what I will miss is the "listen to the 2 seconds at the end
of the selection", for I've long wanted something like this in Cool
Edit, as an aid to tweaking the boundary at the end of the selection.


I think you're right about mp3DirectCut being best for working with
big pieces of a file, rather than with snippets a fraction of a second
long, as I have tried to do (with dismal results).

I've been using mp3splt to chop LibriVox audio books into files about
5 minutes long each before burning them to MP3 disks for my family.
I like it for three main reasons: It's fast; it works in batch mode
on all files in a folder; and it has an option to adjust the actual
split point to fall in a silent gap, to avoid splitting in the middle
of a word. See http://librivox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1608 ,
especially the last post.

mp3splt also does what you describe in terms of splitting recordings
of LPs, which can be done either by gap detection or by means I what I
take to be the equivalent of a cue sheet as derived from the album's
entry in the CDDB. But I haven't tried this.


I have yet to try GoldWave, which was recommended to me by someone
where I live, who uses it to prepare weekly live recordings for a Web
site. He told me to look for older versions which pre-date the switch
to shareware status, since they are freeware, and he said he likes
some aspects of the older version better.

[Stephan]

Doh! Older versions of Goldwave are free? Really?

I know though, that the older versions of goldwave lacks the replace function. Also over-recording a seleted area did not automatically enlengthen the recording with the newly needed space, or if the new recording is smaller than the slected area cuts the marked area down to the new smaller size. Thats a wonderfull feature.

You just mark an area (a sentence perhaps) to speak again, record, and needed space is filled in if needed, or remaining space if shorter gets cut away. Great, and probably the best feature to have for us Librivoxers to re-record parts and sentences.