batch removal of silent frames at beginning of mp3 file?

2009-01-21 21:03:26

Where I'm coming from: I don't like excess silence at the beginning of an mp3 file. Some people would say that I'm devaluing bit-for-bit accuracy here, to which I would respond that I want bit-for-bit accuracy in the music, but in most cases excess silence at the beginning of a track is simply the result of how the album was cut into tracks in the mastering process.
When I rip cd's, I'll use WavTrim to automatically remove leading silence at the beginning of a track, prior to encoding. The exceptions are live albums and other albums which require gapless playback. If a song here has leading silence (the beginning song, or the first song in a gapless sequence of songs) I'll use a Wav-editing program to remove leading silence but make sure that I do so in blocks of 588 samples.

With already-encoded mp3 files, I frequently use mptrim to automatically detect silent frames and remove them. This has its own problems (messes up the header timing information) but that poses no practical problems and is easy enough to fix with mp3val anyway.
The biggest pain here is that with mptrim, I have to open each file, one-at-a-time, and do the operation.

So I'm wondering if there is a program that senses and can remove silent frames at the beginning of an mp3 file. But in batch mode. (And I'm aware that mptrim pro does this for $70, but am interested in freeware).
Does anyone know if there are such programs out there?

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