Start / End Times

[MusicMee]

I just discovered the "Start Time" and "End Time" settings in the track editor. Perfect timing as I was looking for a way to cut out the studio chatter from some of the alternate tracks included with the new super deluxe edition of a Charlie Brown Christmas. That said it triggered a few suggestions I wanted to share:

- If I set, save and then uncheck the start and/or stop time the values should remain. So, if and when I check them again, the previous values are assumed as a starting point. It took me some time to find exactly where I wanted these set and it was frustrating to lose them just because I unchecked them for a listen or two
- Allow multiple start / stop times - a bit of a stretch but I found some songs (medleys) I wanted to break into pieces. A way to indicate track 2a (start/end) 2b (start/end) etc. Would be nice, if possible.
- cut out a section of a track, vs just the start/end. Again, would allow someone to clean out studio chatter, etc.
- Another stretch - it would be nice to indicate start/end times only when not listening to the album in order. In other words, when listening to the album I want to ignore my start/end times BUT if listening to a track in isolation, an album on random or listening to a track as part of a playlist it would be nice to recognize the start/end times. This would allow someone to keep the flow of an album, including listening to studio chatter, etc. but still use a "cleaner" cut of a track in a playlist.

Thanks!

[Goblet]

+1, to add onto this, I'd love if we could set different start/end times for the same track depending on the playlist it's in.

[vzell]

+1

[Mayibongwe]

- cut out a section of a track, vs just the start/end. Again, would allow someone to clean out studio chatter, etc.

+1 to this one if it means the same thing as "provide a way to permanently crop tracks whose start and end times have been modified". Since these start/end times are only effective within MusicBee, I always have a bit of a hard time listening to these tracks when I've synced them to my mobile (they'd be back to playing at full length).

If I can add another suggestion relevant to this:

- Can synchronized lyrics be appropriately modified whenever the start time of a song has been changed?
- I know I can manually add in an offset afterwards, but it would have been nice if MB could do this automatically.

[Zak]

I think the request for editing files falls squarely into the basket of not expecting MusicBee to be the only program anyone ever uses to do anything with a music file.
Countless other programs with years of active development behind them already exist that will do a better job.

Audacity – www.audacityteam.org – was released over 20 years ago and can edit basically anything.
mp3DirectCut – mpesch3.de – is a good alternative for mp3s because it can save files without the need for re-encoding.

[phred]

Countless other programs with years of active development behind them already exist that will do a better job.

I've been using GoldWave for many years. There's a bit of a learning curve, but it can do what you're looking for.

[frankz]

FYI Musicbee does trim files synched to mobile if you convert the format.  

Because I do start/end times a lot with my FLAC files, I set Lossless files to convert FLAC to FLAC upon sync to mobile and what winds up on my mobile is trimmed as desired.

This also works the same way in the format converter as far as I remember.  Set Start end times and then convert FLAC to FLAC (test this first, I'm going from memory here).

Of course, you probably wouldn't want to do this with lossy files.

Hope this helps.

[Zak]

Countless other programs with years of active development behind them already exist that will do a better job.

I've been using GoldWave for many years. There's a bit of a learning curve, but it can do what you're looking for.

It's not free though.

[phred]

It's not free though.

Correct. I should have mentioned that. I'm not sure how it compares to Audacity and MP3DirectCut, however. I do know that it can do the job the OP is looking for. Although frankz's suggestion seems like a decent work-around assuming the OP has flac files.

[Mayibongwe]

FYI Musicbee does trim files synched to mobile if you convert the format.
...
Of course, you probably wouldn't want to do this with lossy files.

I wasn't aware of this, thanks frankz.
I only have mp3's but I'll try it out and see whether the quality loss will bother me enough to make me stick around with the untrimmed versions or not.

[gravitoni]

Does anyone know where the "Start Time" and "End Time" settings are saved for an individual music file? I assumed it was in the meta data of the file but I can't seem top find it

[hiccup]

Does anyone know where the "Start Time" and "End Time" settings are saved for an individual music file? I assumed it was in the meta data of the file but I can't seem top find it

It is stored in a 'bookmarks.dat' file that resides in your Appdata folder.
You can't edit that file yourself, and I also doubt if you could make a backup of it and use it for another MusicBee installation.
But someone could try and let us know of course.
Please ignore.
I was thinking of 'Bookmarks', and not of the start and end times that this topic is about.

Those are probably stored in MusicBee's proprietary database file.  (MusicBeeLibrary.mbl)

[Fox63]

I had made about the same request a while ago.
My request was limited to a checkbox with the option "only in playlist".
There are songs that last up to 8-10 minutes or more and they don't fit in a playlist that long, while simply listening to the single song or the entire album it would be better to listen to it all.