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

mpesch3 audio tools. I’ve got to say this utility is just awesome. Not spyware, etc. and it is amazingly fast.
Since it edits MP3s directly, it is amazingly quick to do. On Windows XP, you don’t even need a playback driver. It does need LAME if you are going to do encodings. Here are some great uses of it including editing down iRiver recordings.
I recorded the kids singing with my iRiver iFP-799. It is a little difficult by the way doing this kind of recording, because setting levels with the iRiver is pretty hard. You can monitor the sound output and you can direct encode at 192Kbps, but to change the record input levels, they don’t have a real time sound meter, so you listen and guess if you are clipping. The menus deeply embedded setting record levels.
The net is that mp3DirectCut is very useful. You basically record a hugh entry then use the Set Begin and Set End buttons to highlight where you want to record. Then you select File/Save Selection… and that piece that is highlighted is cut out as its own MP3.
Now you can open taht MP3 with File Open, then you can look at the overall gain. See if it needs to be higher or lower, then choose Edit/Select All and then Edit/Gain. Click on Lock Sliders together and then click on the up and down arrows to lower the gain and choose OK. I normally raised the gain +6 dB in low passages. This is nearly instantaneous and you can listen to it as well.
Then choose File/Save All… and you get the properly leveled MP3 file ready to be written out with Nero or whatever.
The only slight bummer is that it only supports MP3 Tag v1.1 and MusicMatch which I use for tagging does version 2, so versions get out of sync.