Rich's Tongfamily (Richtong.net add-on)

Now that we are podcasting galore at “Geekfishing”:http://geekfishing.net with the iRiver iFP-795 and the Sound Professionals stereo cardiod lapel microphones, the next step is to do some editing of MP3s.
There are lots of tools out there, but “Snapfiles”:http://www.snapfiles.com/Freeware/gmm/fwaudioedit.html recommends some of these:
* Audacity. This is a freeware editor, it edits in WAV format and then you need to recompress.
* “MP3DirectCut”:http://www.mpesch3.de/. This is a tool that lets you cut and copy regions, but not mix. Its main advantage is file size and the fact that you don’t lost any fidelity since you are always in MP3 land. Also it can automatically cut things into pieces so if you have big long MP3, you can cut it down as needed.
I also tried mptrim, but it is a little harder to use.
# mpTrim can trim MP3s – removing the silence or unwanted parts.
# mpTrim can adjust the volume of MP3s. Volume change can be manual or automatic (volume normalization).
# mpTrim can fade-in/out MP3s (to fix abrupt beginning/ending).
# mpTrim can clean-up MP3s and recover wasted disk space.
# mpTrim keeps the music quality intact, no matter how many times you process an MP3, because it works directly in the MP3 format without having to decode/re-encode. That also makes it very fast.