Sunday, February 10, 2008
Remove We7's MP3 Advertising for Free
We7 has built up a nice collection of free downloadable music that's also DRM-free, but many listeners will be disappointed that they have to listen to a short advertising message before every track.
The only way they offer to get ad-free tracks is to buy We7 credits, which you can redeem for tracks. But there's a simpler (and free) way: use an MP3 trimmer or editor. While many of these programs are unwieldy to use with more features packed in than you really need, mpTrim offers an easy-to-use interface completely devoted to trimming down music files.
Just download mpTrim, and you can start using it immediately. The first thing to do is to open your MP3 file in mpTrim, which will bring up the bitrate, length, and other information on the file.
Then you can select how much of the file you want to trim or remove either from the beginning or the end. You can either do this by frame or by time. I suggest trimming off 
about 10 seconds from the beginning of a We7 MP3 since this is about the length of the typical advertising message. You can fine-tune this by hitting the play button in mpTrim to find a more accurate length.
You can see from the screenshot that this removes about 234.5KB from the file and reduces it to 4:06 minutes.
Once you're satisfied, hit Save or Save As to finalize your ad-free track.
You can even batch-trim multiple MP3 files, but that requires the pro version of mpTrim.
Obviously, this technique might be against We7's terms of service, but since no DRM exists to stop it, anyone can modify the MP3 file as he or she pleases.
Labels: Technology
