Re: [Audacity-devel] specification for cut-tool for radio editors

[Dominic M. <do...@mi...>]

Matt Brubeck wrote:
> This makes Vorbis very friendly to lossless editing.  For example, if I want
> to shift all of the audio in a Vorbis stream by an arbitrary offset, I can
> just adjust the page granule positions.
> 
> As far as I can tell, this is not possible with MP3.  Each MPEG audio frame
> contains a fixed number of samples.  If audio were shifted by other than a
> multiple of this width, it would all need to re-encoded because the frame
> boundaries had changed.  I'm still looking through the specs to see if I've
> missed something here...

The only way I can think of that we could get around this would be to
"quantize" all editing boundaries to MP3 frame sizes (1/40 of a second
or something like that).  Power users might feel happy with this if
there's an easy way to "give up" on MP3 editing mode; novice users
might feel limited or confused.

- Dominic