I recently got an Edirol R-09 to record myself at the piano. Turns out it's also very good for recording other people at the piano! Great little device.

Sometimes those other pianists play pieces in succession, such that there's no time to stop and restart recording for each piece. The result is a single large MP3 recording which it'd be nice to split into tracks, Naively, this entails importing into an audio editor and then reencoding into MP3 when exporting each track, but this approach degrades audio quality. A better way: find reasonable breakpoints by ear with your customary MP3 player, then use a specialized tool that exploits the frame-by-frame nature of MP3 audio to split the data on frame boundaries. I used mp3splt on my Mac (built from pkgsrc, of course) like so:

$ mp3splt gigantic.mp3 00.00 07.30 14.30 20.03 41.39 EOF

After dropping the resulting tracks into my music library, I found a further neat trick: iTunes lets you specify start and end times for a track. I specified these for each of my new tracks. This way the dead time before each piece and the applause afterward are still there, but by default I hear only the music itself.

Out of curiosity, I then burned the tracks to an audio CD. iTunes honored the start/end times here, too, and left the deliberately skipped parts off the disc. Exactly what I expected and wanted. Nice.