Edit an MP3 song to add extra silent time

By | May 25, 2008

If you’re like the millions of audio buffs out there, you’ll find that quite often, certain mp3 songs end too quickly. That means, they have little or no period of silence after the ending of the song. It could be due to sloppy editing of the song copy by the person who edited and saved the mp3.

How do we fix this? I’ve been searching for a way to add a few extra seconds of silent time to some of the mp3 songs, I have because I find their abrupt ending a little too jarring. A few extra seconds of silent time added to the mp3 right after the anding should make it sound better, and more natural.

Rather surprisingly, searching and asking this question in forums did not turn up a suitable answer. But enter Audacity. This is a free and open source digital audio editor software program that helped to do just what I wanted.

Audacity

So if you’re in a similar situation and wish to add more silent time to an mp3, here’s a quick guide to do that:

1) Download and install Audacity.

2) Download the LAME mp3 encoder file, called lame_enc.dll from a trusted dll file site.

3) Open up the mp3 file in Audacity.

4) Point the cursor really carefully at the point you want to add extra silent time to the song. As far as possible, this should be right at the point of the stated end time of the song, which will be displayed in Audacity.

5) In Audacity, click on Generate Silence.

Generate silence in Audacity

6) Add in the few seconds. If the song already has a couple seconds of fade out, then you’d probably just want to add a couple of seconds of extra silence.

Add a few seconds of silence in Audacity

7) Export the modified song (currently an Audacity file) as an mp3 song, and you’re done.

Export modified Audacity file as mp3

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