Remove intro/outro from an MP3 without re-encoding
I have this podcast I listen to repeatedly. But most episodes have an intro and outro part before the actual episode, which gets quite annoying. One possibility is, of course, to just use an audio editor like Audacity, cut the unwanted parts, and save the file. But this would result in the MP3 being re-encoded and losing in quality. This shouldn't be necessary since I only want to cut off some data, right?
The tool for the job is mp3splt. I wrote this little bash script:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
F_IN=$1
F_OUT=${F_IN%.mp3}
START=$2
END=EOF-$3
OUT_DIR=./nointro
# Split at "-".
FILE_SPLIT=(${F_IN//-/ })
# Remove "_" and " " characters.
TRACK=${FILE_SPLIT[0]//_/}
TRACK=${TRACK// /}
mp3splt -f -d "$OUT_DIR" "$F_IN" "$START" "$END" -o "$F_OUT"
eyeD3 --track=$TRACK "$OUT_DIR/$F_IN"
Example: ./shorten.sh 26-FacelessOldWoman.mp3 1.18 1.15.5
First, the track number will be extracted from the file name. In my case, the number is always at the beginning and separated by a minus from the title. So we split the string and remove some unwanted characters (whitespace, underscore).
In the example, the first 1min 18sec will be removed and the last 1min 15.5sec. The resulting MP3 will be saved with the same name in the directory set in OUT_DIR.
Most id3 tags will be kept – including the embedded cover –, but the track number will be overwritten by mp3splt. That is why I extracted the track number from the file name before. Now I can set it again with eyeD3.
Done.