Basic Audio and Video Editing

Chips said:

I've got an MP3 music track and a few videos (AVI and MP4) that I wish to simply chop the beginnings or ends off. Are there any free programs that I can use to do this basic editing?

Yep.

MP3: for nothing more than chopping, you can use mp3directcut. This has the advantage of NOT re-encoding the mp3, so you don't lose any sound quality. The disadvantage is that you can't do much else but cut. You might be able to fade--I haven't looked at it lately.

mpesch3.de - Homepage of mp3DirectCut and 1by1 - free MP3 editor and directory player

MP3: for more advanced editing, including cutting and pretty much anything else, you can use Audacity. It's a great program, but you'd have to re-encode when you are finished with the editing. That's not a big problem---I've never been able to detect the loss in sound quality when you only do a single re-encode. If you did 4 or 5 re-encodes, I'd expect you could detect the loss.

AVI: Machete Lite will do simple cuts on AVIs without re-encoding. It also will work on WMV files. But just those two file types. It is very simple to use.

There are a lot of programs that will do simple cuts on video, but many of them involve a re-encode and you are likely to notice it on video files.

Avidemux is free and I think it can operate on several file types, but it isn't simple for the uninitiated. I think it will NOT re-encode if you know how to operate it properly. I haven't played with it in years.

There may be others.

I'd like to find a simple to use video editor that does not re-encode and that works on many different file types. I haven't had any luck. Avidemux may be the simplest.