Re: [Phys-l] Another technical question

[John Mallinckrodt <ajm@csupomona.edu>]

All of this is true, however, I can tell you from a LOT of experience that unless have some seriously golden ears, there will be no audible artifacts.  As far as how to do it, any audio editing program can handle this simple task.  I use Amadeus Pro (for the Mac, written by Martin Hairer, a mathematician at the University of Warwick) and heartily recommend it although there are many other alternatives for Mac and other platforms.

Ludwik, If you don't have the capability and don't care to get into it, I'd be happy to do the concatenation for you.

John Mallinckrodt
Cal Poly Pomona


On May 5, 2011, at 1:38 AM, John Denker wrote:

> On 05/04/2011 06:15 PM, ludwik kowalski wrote:
> > I want to concatenate  several short mp3 files (turn them into one
> > long mp3 file). How can this be done?
>
> Don't do it.
>
> 1) mp3 uses a lot of context, which means that any concatenation
> involves decoding mp3 into raw audio, concatenating, and then
> re-encoding.
>
> Some programs may do this behind your back so you don't notice,
> but it is nevertheless being done.
>
> 2) mp3 encoding is lossy.
>
> 3) Since you have the original raw audio lying around, you are
> better off concatenating that, and then encoding.
>
>
> Since audio files are so small compared to the capabilities of
> modern computers, there's no reason to edit anything other than
> the original raw audio, upstream of any lossy encoding.
>
> Compression makes sense as the last step before mass distribution.
> It does not make sense at any earlier step.
>
> For video the strategy is trickier, but for audio it is a
> no-brainer.
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