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Are you bothered by your mp3 audio files having silence at the beginning and end? Do you want to permanently remove them while preserving the audio quality? You can do so by using a free and (very) lightweight software called mp3DirectCut.
Download mp3DirectCut from its official website. If you have trouble installing the software, try right-clicking the installer file and choosing “Run as administrator”.
Single file processing
1. Open an mp3 file. Use CTRL + O or click File > Open…
2. Select the entire audio. Use CTRL + A or click Edit > Select all. Audio is highlighted when the background color changes from blue to cyan, as shown in the figure below.
OPTIONAL: Go to the end of the track to check the audio length/duration. Press the End button or click Go to track.
3. Automatically remove the silence. Click Special > Auto crop. If silence at the beginning or end of the file was successfully removed, the audio length is decreased.
4. Save the audio. Click File > Save complete audio…
5. Overwrite the original file or save it as a new file. Click Save.
Batch processing
To process multiple mp3 files, do the following steps:
1. Open the batch processing window. Use CTRL + B or click File > Batch processing…
2. Locate the directory containing the audio files to be processed. Tick the checkbox Auto crop. In this example, we choose to overwrite the audio files. Leave other settings as is. Click Start to begin processing.
OPTIONAL: As an extra, you can also set to amplify the audio to the loudest possible level without clipping. Simply tick the Normalize checkbox and leave its default level setting (as 0.0).
3. When prompted if you want to overwrite originals, click OK.
4. Click Close once batch processing is done.
Final thoughts
mp3DirectCut is a very lightweight software (303 KB as of time of writing) that allows you to automatically trim the silence at both the beginning and end of your mp3 files. You can even set the silence threshold to fit your needs. Additionally, it is feature-packed which includes batch processing for multiple audio files, and audio normalization to amplify the audio as much as possible without clipping. But perhaps what makes mp3DirectCut so unique is that no re-encoding of the mp3 takes place during processing, a feature lacking in many other audio editors. Your mp3 audio files do not degrade in quality after processing.