Can anyone recommend a good free MP3 editor? I've got some MP3s that I'd like to trim down and knock a few seconds off of. But all the ones that I encounter and finding searches charge, and they usually don't tell you that they charge until after you installed it and used it, which is really deceptive

audacity, but I think no matter how you edit MP3s, unless you keep the edited work as wav files, you end up with transcodes. MP3s that have been encoded twice. not great for music.

https://www.audacityteam.org/

mp3DirectCut is good and can do it without re-encoding.

Audacity, 100%. I've been using it for decades (and time is going way too fucking quickly after watching myself type that).