"cropping" songs
 

so we've all bought a cd and had that hidden song at the end that causes the track to be 14 minutes long with 7 minutes of silence in the middle. is there a simple program (or a way in itunes) to crop an audio file down so that i just have the songs? i have a mac and itunes (obviously) but i haven't found anything that will do this simple task for me. help?

EDIT: FOLLOW-UP QUESTION.
thanks shauk for the advice on itunes, it worked great. so i had this idea now to crop songs down to 15 or 20 seconds and use them as ringtones, for free instead of paying the $2.50 or whatever. i can cut the songs down and get them on my phone, but the file size is too big to use as a ringtone (or so the phone tells me). is there a way in itunes to lower the quality of a track and therefore lessen the file size? thanks!

iTunes does it. Select the start/stop times of your MP3 file in the info window. Close the info window. Now, go to the Advanced menu and do the "Convert to MP3" option. Viola, a new MP3 is created with only your cropped selection. The original file is unchanged.

Gotta love undocumented features...

Oh, to get the MP3 itself, right-click on the new MP3 and do the "Show in Finder" option. There is is, right next to the original one...

Any audio editor worth it's salt will do the same thing. Audacity is a good one that's available for free and will edit mp3's. You do have to grab LAME seperately, but that's not hard. Once you've got the file loaded up simply cut out the part you don't want (or cut and paste to create two tracks, if you prefer it that way).

I use Goldwave for all audio editing. Not sure if it works on a Mac.

Audacity gets my vote as well. I didn't know about the iTunes trick - thanks Shauk!

I use Audacity as well. Found out about it when I got into The Mars Volta. I may be a heretic, but I cannot stand all that warbling crap they do in between songs, so I removed it. :)

Gotta vote audacity as well. I did not believe it was cross compatible to Mac until I just looked it up now, so this makes it all the more useful.

Check out the free MakeiPhoneRingtone by the great Rogue Amoeba. I don't have an iPhone, but I've heard good things about this, and I have other products by that company.

^ that would be great, but i don't have an iPhone...

Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but Audacity man! Seriously, this piece of software will provide all the audio editing you need. I don't know what format your phone uses, but you can select an encoding rate for mp3 files from the preferences and choose various quality levels for any of the other formats. Simply import the file, set the encoding rate in preferences (you'll have to point it to the LAME libraries first) and then export it as an mp3. Lower bitrates provide lower quality sound but also smaller file sizes, so play around with it until you find the highest quality that your phone will accept.