Show HN: Cjam – a modern MP3 file editor

[cutandjoin]

Cjam is an MP3 editing and playback tool for Windows.

The MP3 format itself has been stable for decades, but advances in CPU power and memory have shifted the relationship between files and hardware, creating room for new approaches to working with MP3s.

Cjam provides both a GUI and scripting interface that allow you to process large numbers of files at the frame level. This improves on existing tools, offering faster and more flexible editing and playback.

[LeoPanthera]

I'm surprised Github allows the hosting of binaries of closed-sourced software. What is the point of Github when there's no source?

[geoffpado]

I suspect most of GitHub's usage (by repo count, at least) is for closed-source software. It's just in private repositories.

[cutandjoin]

It’s a strong advantage for individual developers like me to distribute binaries on a trusted platform without any hosting cost.

[xnx]

No reason not to link directly to https://cjmapp.net/. Free (beer) software is great, but linking to GitHub gives the impression it's open source.

Seems somewhat similar to mp3directcut?

[cutandjoin]

Actually, I posted before using the main site link, and HN doesn’t allow posting the same URL twice, so I used the GitHub link this time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43883180

And yes, Cjam is quite similar to mp3DirectCut. It’s like managing several mdc instances together in one list.

[nine_k]

It's hard to appreciate the usefulness of this software. What does processing mp3 at the frame level allows?

BTW is mp3 still relevant now? It seems that AAC, Opus, and Vorbis are all clearly superior, and widely supported. What makes mp3 still worth considering?

[Cockbrand]

> What makes mp3 still worth considering?

A lot of people (including myself) won't re-encode their existing music collections into another lossy format to avoid degradation in sound quality.

Also, as much as it sucks these days, a lot of people (including myself) are still in the Apple ecosystem (formerly iTunes, now Music.app). For these people, mp3 seems to be the best compressed format that's compatible with the rest of the world.

[cutandjoin]

I use MP3 a lot myself, so I built this tool around it.

Cjam is designed in a way that makes it easy to adapt to other small, lossy formats as well, so it has potential to go beyond MP3 in the future.

[gapan]

You're right, but mp3 is still even more widely supported. It is also good enough, most people can't tell the difference between original files and around 128kbps ABR mp3 files, let alone higher bitrates. And there are huge personal libraries of mp3 files out there that are not going away.

That said, I don't see the use of this tool. It's a proprietary tool that does basic things for which free tools (in every sense of the word) have existed for a long time now.

[cutandjoin]

Cjam includes features that don’t exist in other tools, and it’s freeware.

[Eisenstein]

> BTW is mp3 still relevant now? It seems that AAC, Opus, and Vorbis are all clearly superior, and widely supported. What makes mp3 still worth considering?

It is incredibly relevant. MP3 is the baseline standard for lossy compressed audio. If you have an MP3, you can play it and convert it anywhere. There are definitely benefits of AAC and others, but they are not great enough to forgo the universality of the MP3 format when all you want is 2 channel 16 bit 44.1khz audio.

[notpushkin]

Can you explain in layman terms, what’s the point here? Editing without re-encoding?

[cutandjoin]

I rethought MP3 editing without decoding/re-encoding for today’s hardware.

Existing tools tend to focus on one action at a time, like splitting or joining files. But Cjam lets you define multiple actions across multiple files at once using scripts. So it makes it easier to create and share more complex editing workflows.

You can find some example scripts on the forum: https://forum.cjmapp.net/viewforum.php?f=9