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How to chop large mp3 into smaller mp3's with Audacity?

I had great advice from EEers to use AudaCity for chopping my hour long concert mp3s into individual songs. I have it downloaded and running. But after I highlight the section of audio I want to export - almost everything is greyed out. I would think I should be able the highlight the audio I want and export to the smaller mp3 or use the "Edit/Trim" command to whittle it down to size. But I am clearly missing a step.
Can someone please walk me through the steps of loading a large mp3 and breaking it down into smaller mp3s for each individual song? Thanks.

osmystatocny

If you don't want to re-encode again (if it's in mp3 you would lose quality a bit) you can use cue sheet+foobar player.
You can play your song and just type time into new txt document. How does it look you can see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_sheet_(computing)

For one file basically like this

PERFORMER "FAITHLESS"
TITLE "THE BEDROOM SESSIONS"
FILE "FAITHLESS - THE BEDROOM SESSIONS.mp3" MP3
TRACK 01 AUDIO
INDEX 01 00:00:00
TRACK 02 AUDIO
INDEX 01 05:08:02
.....

From the foobar2000 you can even save it as an mp3 I reckon

fredshovel

You don't highlight the area you want to export. You highlight the area that you don't want and delete it by hitting the delete button, and then export what's left.

fredshovel

Just adding, you are editing a wave file, which needs to be exported either as a wave file and then converted in something like iTunes -- or you add the Lame encoder to Audacity and export as an MP3.

amigan_99

ASKER

I found that you can select the portion and export. The problem I was running into was I was playing the songs and the pausing to do my select and export. If instead of pausing I press "Stop" playing - then when I select a portion of the loaded mp3 all of my editing feature like Export Selected are available and not greyed out.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

BillDL

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BillDL

Actually, before you even start editing the track, it would be a good idea to create several new "Label Tracks" using the "Project" menu. You can then name each of these tracks to reflect the selections that you will then create by adding a Start and Stop Label (tag) to each of these Label Tracks. This makes it easier to track your selections. You can easily delete unwanted Label Tracks by clicking the X to the left of the track name.

amigan_99

ASKER

Cool - even better than the method I discovered.

BillDL

Thank you amigan_99.
Audacity doesn't have many (if any) Right-Click menu options like most programs that were originally written for Windows, and it has some fairly quirky ways of executing tasks. A lot of Open Source software that is cross-platform or modified from the original Linux version is like this, and it takes a lot more experimentation to find out how to perform tasks. The Help file for Audacity is reasonably populated to answer most tasks.

If you are interested, the help file that opens from Audacity's Help menu is:
C:\Program Files\Audacity\audacity-1.2-help.htb
If you create a copy of that file then rename it by changing the file extension from *.htb to *.zip, you have a zip file that can be unpacked to its own folder with WinZip to give you all the separate help files. The one that explains a bit more about the labels I mentioned is:
C:\Program Files\Audacity\Copy of audacity-1.2-help\track_label.htm

That web page will show you in a bit more detail how to name the labels, etc.

Bill