The other side of the moon

Yesterday I had to convert a few mp3 files to wavs. I also needed to crop them a bit on both ends. This is how I did it:

mplayer -ss 0.5 -endpos 1:14 -ao pcm:file="newfile.wav" oldfile.mp3

This is how it works: -ss says how many seconds of the file to skip at the start. If you don't know the time, but the number of bytes instead, use -sb instead. Note that -ss only works with seconds, but accepts fractional seconds. -endpos says at what point to stop playing. This accepts time as hh:mm:ss.ms or in bytes. If you specify only one number, it's seconds. -ao is a special instruction that specifies a plugin, and everything following the plugin are plugin specific options. pcm is the format for wave files. You could use any format you like. mplayer -ao help will tell you which codecs are supported. I haven't figured out all the suboptions for pcm yet.