[MPlayer-users] play only first 30 seconds of a song

[rwk at americom.com]

> > This is the wrong direction...  I want to convert the first 30
> > seconds of a VBR .mp3 file to .wav.  Is this possible with mplayer or
> > mencoder?
> 
> I don't think so, no. MEncoder is a video encoder, not an audio encoder.
> About the best you can do is
> 
> mencoder -oac pcm -novideo -endpos 30 filename.mp3 -o filename.avi
> 
> and then
> 
> mplayer -vo null -vc dummy -dumpaudio -dumpfile filename.wav filename.avi
> 
> but that's clunky, by no means guaranteed to work, and you ought to be
> able to do it more easily and perhaps better with a program which is
> actually intended to do audio encoding, rather than one which does it as
> a side thing to make video encoding work easier.

Any suggestions for a definitive audio encoder?

Of course I use lame for the .mp3 output but it also does not have this
option.

Dick