mpcut 1.1b review

This program allows you to visualise the power levels in each frame of an MP3 file, select a number of frames, cut out frames you don

License: BSD License File size: 38K Developer: Warren Toomey

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This program allows you to visualise the power levels in each frame of an MP3 file, select a number of frames, cut out frames you don't want, and then save the selected frames (excluding the cuts) to a separate MP3 file.

Note: If the input MP3 stream uses the bit reservoir (and most do), then the first frame in the selection will be incomplete, as it depends on the previous frame in the stream. You will get some problems on playback. If you disable the bit reservoir when encoding (e.g use --nores with Lame), then this isn't a problem.

This is my first GUI program ever, and I've only tested it on FreeBSD 3.x and Mandrake Linux 6.0. To install the application, you will need:

GTK+ 1.2
Autoconf
Automake
GNU Make
mpg123 to play a selection

Running mpcut will bring up a window with a white rectangle to display the frame powerlevels. You can either open a file by naming it on the command-line, or by using File->Open by the drop-down menus.

After opening an MP3 file, you will see a plot of frame power vs frame number in the display area. The frame numbers are shown on the horizontal scale above the display area. Use the mouse and click-drag to select a region, which will be displayed in red. A single-click will deselect the region.

Note: there is no visual feedback when performing mouse drags. A future version will remedy this omission.

If you click-drag from within the selected region and drag outside the region, the new area is added to the selection. If you click-drag from outside the selected region and drag into the region, parts of the selection will be removed.

You can do Edit->Select All to select the whole file, or Edit->Unselect All to clear the selection.

You can also set a marker by doing a single middle-click. The marker is shown as a vertical blue line. If you then do a middle-button mouse drag, the marker sets the start of a selection, and the end of the drag sets the endpoint of the selection.

You can `cut out' a selected area by using the `c' key. The frames will be greyed out in the display area, but they will never be played or saved to your save file. You can remove all the cuts you have made with the `r' key. You can undo the last cut by using the ctrl-Z keystroke.

What's New in This Release:
Added ctrl-Z function to undo the last cut. Fixed bug: cuts are cleared when a file is opened.