does anyone know how to split a audio file (mp3, but it can be any format) into separate files?

i been looking at mplayer, but all it can do is dump the audio (not exactly what i need, as i don't know of any program that can use that dumped file), but mplayer does have the option "-ss" to allow me to start playing from a certain time (what i need), ... i also looked at trascode, but i cant find any options to tell it were to start/stop encoding .... i also tried to load up the file with sweep (a audio editor) , but the file is just so big that it eats up the memory and makes the computer very very slow, to top it off i haven't been able to get it to fully load the file (for some reason it either restarts trying to load it, or i have to kill it, or it crashes ....)

any ideas (preferably one that wont hog the memory, the file is able 85mb big as a mp3, but i only want 4-5 minutes of it at a selected part

Sox might do it.
http://sox.sourceforge.net/

Personally I'd use audacity and just cut & paste.

Dunno what the mem requirements would be though.

I've a 1.3 celery with 256Mb and it works fine.

tried audacity deleted it after it didn't load up the file, apparently it ran out of /tmp space (i need to move that to a separate partition .. but still, it was only 65% full, and it was on a 5 gig partition ... (owell, ill give it another try, as sweep loads files into memory (can be bad) but audacity loads them into /tmp (can be bad .... owell i was going to move this to a different partition anyways ...) ..

both sweep and audacity have the same dependencies and libs, i think ill keep both (tho i hate that they use the gtk1 toolkit, it just don't look as good as gtk2 .... but whatever works )
...

mikshaw: perfect .. thanks, sox worked like a charm, i originally skipped that program thinking it could only convert

thanks again all