How long is the gap in mp3?

Splitting large MP3's into smaller files

• I'm trying to split up big mp3's into smaller ones and my usual tricks aren't working either because either the track information I have is wrong or the CD is not listed on freedb. Do I have to suffer some number crunching or is there a better and easier way to break them up? I have a large number of full album MP3's (where the entire album is in one file) and would like to split them up into each of their tracks. I appreciate that playing them back on most players will introduce a gap, but that doesn't bother me. At present I download the XMCD format from freedb and then use mp3split (or musicutter) to break the files up. Afterwards I then run them through MusicBrainz to clean up the tags so that they can be put onto my iPod. However I've got a number of MP3's which I can't split because either the freedb information is wrong for that album or because it doesn't have it in the database. Finding lengths of tracks isn't too much of a problem as MusicBrainz often has the details, but it doesn't give you the opportunity to download a CUE/XMCD file and the tools I'm using don't give me any ability to just plug in the track length. As such, if I want to use those then I have to dig out my calculator and work out the offset from the start of the album for each track. As you can imagine, I'd rather not do this. In an ideal world, I'd like to just be able to say "track 1 is 4m 30s, track 2 is 2m 27s" and so on and have the software either do the splitting for me based on that, or generate a XMCD or CUE file automatically that I can use with the aforementioned programs. I know that this won't be 100% accurate, but it'll be better than nothing. Does such a beast exist? If not, how do you go about splitting big files when you don't have anything but track lengths to go on? Or do you just suck it and do the maths? Or do you not even bother?

• Answer:

  "Or do you not even bother?" : Yes. I ripped all my concert CDs as large mp3's rather than have the gaps between songs due to applause. Then I discovered how much a pain it was when I hit stop on my player rather than pause. If I could find a graphic editor to split them up, I would, but I haven't.