One of the most invaluable tools I found for cleaning up and optimizing my audio files before they were used on the broadcast is a program called MPTrim. The program itself is tiny (only 224kb) but it does some powerful and useful operations on your music collection.

First and foremost, it cleans “silence” from your files. It never seems to fail, that no matter where your MP3 came from, the amount of silence either at the beginning or end of the song can be excessive - I’ve seen plenty with more than 3-5 seconds worth. This can be a minor annoyance, but it also creates a slightly larger file size. Then of course there are those “artistic” moments when some artist (Damian Rice comes to mind) thinks it would be a cool idea to add nine minutes or more worth of nothing but dead air into a song. With MPTrim, you can easily edit out all of that, and in specific cases like the one just mentioned, greatly reduce the size of the file and improve the quality of your listening experience.

Another benefit to MPTrim is its built in normalization. All you have to do is click “Auto” under volume control, and it will adjust the volume of your file to a standardized volume. This was a must for broadcasting music - but even in my personal listening I use it on all my files. It keeps me from having to constantly adjust the volume on my Zune to an even level - after using MPTrim, all my files are at the same audio level. The variance among MP3’s in regards to volume is really significant - and this feature makes MPTrim even more of an asset.

The fade in/out feature also has an advantage. Although I almost never use the fade in portion - the fade out is great for use on live tracks, where without the benefit of continuation on a recorded CD your MP3 comes to an abrupt halt with the sound of an audience screaming. Use the fade out feature of MPTrim and you get a nice, clean fade out of the crowd noise that makes your track sound like it was professionally edited.

The biggest plus to MPTrim is that there is a free version that will do almost everything the premium version will do. The only limits being that the free version will not edit a song longer than about six and a half minutes, and it will not run in batch mode to clean up all of your files at one time.

The only con I have regarding the purchased version is that the creator offers its pro version in stages. MPTrim PE can be as little as $19.95 or as much as $35.95. The $19.95 version is kind of useless in my opinion, and the $35.95 version is a bit pricey. MPTrim Pro, which allows batch file editing as well as VBR seek and CRC repair, is $69.95 - and more than I feel I would pay for personal audio editing. I did buy it for the Internet streams when I was broadcasting, and it does an excellent job on all facets of cleaning and repairing, silence removal and volume normalization.

Primarily because the free version does such a great job, and because there are not that many songs anymore that go over six and a half minutes, I highly recommend the free version which can be found here. If you are a serious collector and audiophile, the $35.95 version (MPTrim PE) will absolutely do.