Post #404689 by barfa on Thu, Aug 28, 2008 10:17 AM

Maybe a little late, but I wanted to weigh in on this. If you use a normal audio editor (adobe audition or audacity) you will end up editing the audio in wave-format. If you then want to have your newly splitted tracks in mp3's you will have to re-encode them. This is often considered a Bad Thing, since mp3-encoding always makes the audio sound a little bit worse. There is more to it but that's too technical for me.
If you on the other hand just want to burn an audioCD after you have splitted the long file into separate tracks then you will have no degradation of sound quality as long as you save the splitted tracks to .wav or something lossless.
If you want to split your long mp3-file into smaller mp3-files and want to avoid re-encoding there's a way however. A program called MP3 Surgeon Pro can split mp3-s without re-encoding.
Now, re-encoding is actually not so bad if the original mp3 is of high quality (maybe bitrate 160-192 or more) and if you re-encode it to at least the same bitrate.
[edit:spell]

[ Edited by: barfa 2008-08-31 10:58 ]