Tidying up the songs in my Music Library

I woke up this morning with this song in my head but wanted to have a version of it that I could listen to any time either on my home stereo (via iTunes through SoundBridge) or on my iPod.

A quick search turned up ListenToYouTube.com where all I needed to do was provide the YouTube URL for the video and they’ll rip it and provide you with an MP3 file of it, no charge(!). The resulting file is encoded at 128 bps but, for the quality on the YouTube video that’s more than enough for my purposes.

But there was a lead-in section explaining the purpose for the video which is nice in the video context but was a bit distracting for just straight listening. So another search yielded MP3Trim which is a freeware version of the software that can handle files of up to about 9.7 MBytes. The software nicely trims leading and trailing stuff off of MP3s and so was perfect for removing the distracting piece.

Using iTunes’ seek bar I figure out at what point I want the trim to take place, decide if I need it to be abrupt or a fast or slow fade in/out and *presto*. New MP3 with only the parts that I want.

So I’m walking through my collection now removing annoying guitar solos, that annoying guy at the end of the Fugee’s “Killing Me Softly” song and Dolly Parton (yes I have a couple of Dolly Parton songs) yakking away at the end of “Star Spangled Banner”.

I’ve only stumbled so far trying to trim Guns N’ Roses “Knockin’ on Heavean’s Door”. At 10.2 MBytes it’s about 5% too big for the Freeware MP3Trim to handle. Registering the software would resolve this for me. But it’s a little pricey for the use that I would make of it. I’ll just get something that can split the file grossly near where I want to trim and *then* trim it. And if that doesn’t work I don’t think I’ll worry about it.

Of course, if I were only listening to this music on my iTunes or my iPod platforms I could just alter the properties so that the portions of the song that I don’t want are simply not played, but this ONLY works on those platforms. Playing through my Soundbridge or directly off of an SD card on my BlackBerry or car stereo would still have the annoying bits.