best freeware audio editing software for my application?

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Citizen Snips

Limp Gawd
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Jan 6, 2009
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I've been researching freeware audio editing tools to try and find the best one for my application. I have a digital voice recorder that will only generate WMA files. I would like to cut sections out of these recordings and either discard them or save them as separate files. These files will either be left as WMA or possibly converted to MP3. The way I see it, there are a couple of ways to approach this:

1. Convert the WMA files to MP3, and then use an MP3 editor on the resulting files
2. Edit the WMA files directly, and then save them as a WMA or MP3 file

I would prefer to edit the files while minimizing the amount of quality lost due to recompression. It seems the only way to ensure zero quality loss due to recompression would be to use a program that can edit WMA files directly without having to perform a recompression to save the changes. Otherwise I would be looking at 1-2 losses due to compression by using option 1 above - once to convert the WMA file to MP3, and another loss I have to recompress the MP3 file to save the changes. Option 2 would only result in a loss due to recompression if the program was incapable of saving changes to a WMA file without recompressing it, or if I wanted to save the WMA file as an MP3 file.

I've considered the fact that the audio I am working with consists only of spoken voices and background noises. I would think that the quality of these recordings wouldn't suffer much due to recompression as a result. Is that correct? I'm also aware of the fact that some freeware editors such as Audacity are incapable of saving changes to an MP3 or WMA file without performing a recompression. Having said that, I have another couple of questions:

1. What is the bitrate equivalence between MP3 and WMA?
2. If I edit a WMA/MP3 file in Audacity and save it as the same type of file with the same bitrate, will the loss of quality due to recompression be negligible?

The only program I've tried so far is Audacity. Given the above information, is that the best program for my application, or are there other ones that would be better suited for what I'm trying to do?
 
Citizen Snips said:
1. What is the bitrate equivalence between MP3 and WMA?
Click to expand...
WMA is a bit more efficient, relatively on par with AAC. I'd say that, for any given bit rate in WMA, you may need 110-120% of that bit rate for LAME MP3.

However, with LAME MP3, you don't select a bit rate for optimal quality: you set a quality level via the -V parameter for constant quality encoding. Just use -V0 for the best VBR quality level.

Citizen Snips said:
2. If I edit a WMA/MP3 file in Audacity and save it as the same type of file with the same bitrate, will the loss of quality due to recompression be negligible?
Click to expand...
Possibly, assuming Audacity supports WMA as an output type (i.e. it is able to encode WMA).

You should keep in mind that you don't need to convert back to a lossy format. You can save as WAV, AIFF or FLAC (or any other other uncompressed/lossless format) without losing any quality.
 
phide said:
Possibly, assuming Audacity supports WMA as an output type (i.e. it is able to encode WMA).
Click to expand...

Audacity does support WMA as an output type, but to save edits to a WMA file, you must recompress it. Apparently there are other sound editors out there which can save edits to WMA and MP3 files without recompressing them.

phide said:
You should keep in mind that you don't need to convert back to a lossy format. You can save as WAV, AIFF or FLAC (or any other other uncompressed/lossless format) without losing any quality.
Click to expand...

I've never considered this option before. I suppose I could convert the WMA file to WAV (no loss in quality), edit it in Audacity (no loss of quality to save from a WAV to a WAV, right?), and then convert the finished, edited WAV file to either WMA or MP3 (loss of quality).
 
There's an inherent quality loss when going from lossy -> lossless, so unless you need the intermediary step of converting your audio to WAV or what have you, just skip that and edit the original format directly.

Unfortunately, depending on what kind of editing you're doing, I can't think of any editors that allow you to use MP3 or WMA directly without recompressing (unless you're just cutting).
 
Snowknight26 said:
There's an inherent quality loss when going from lossy -> lossless, so unless you need the intermediary step of converting your audio to WAV or what have you, just skip that and edit the original format directly.

Unfortunately, depending on what kind of editing you're doing, I can't think of any editors that allow you to use MP3 or WMA directly without recompressing (unless you're just cutting).
Click to expand...

Cutting is the only editing I need to do, but I need to be able to cut sections out of the original file and save them as separate files, not just trim the beginning/end of the original file.
 
For MP3s, you could try mp3DirectCut or pcutmp3, whereas for WMA files, I'd give AsfBin a shot.
 
I've used mp3directcut to edit stream recordings. Works fine.
 
Citizen Snips said:
Audacity does support WMA as an output type, but to save edits to a WMA file, you must recompress it.
Click to expand...
Yes.

Citizen Snips said:
I suppose I could convert the WMA file to WAV (no loss in quality), edit it in Audacity (no loss of quality to save from a WAV to a WAV, right?), and then convert the finished, edited WAV file to either WMA or MP3 (loss of quality).
Click to expand...
Audacity does this already. It decodes any lossy source to raw PCM. To avoid a quality loss, the final format would have to be uncompressed or lossless, which was what I was suggesting.
 
Snowknight26 said:
Don't convert them to anything.
Click to expand...

This!
work in the original format and saving. ONLY when you are sending out do you then compress/convert.

If something new needs to be done, work on the uncompressed source.
repeated conversions will cause serious signal degradation
 
Snowknight26 said:
Don't convert them to anything.
Click to expand...

eeyrjmr said:
This!
work in the original format and saving. ONLY when you are sending out do you then compress/convert.

If something new needs to be done, work on the uncompressed source.
repeated conversions will cause serious signal degradation
Click to expand...

What freeware (or inexpensive) programs can operate directly on WMA files without having to recompress them to save changes?
 
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