Create a silent mp3 from the command line

Question

I am trying to create a silent / empty mp3 file of (x) seconds using the command line. Quite a simple task I thought!

It seems LAME is able to do something like this, bu

Answer 1

sox -n -r 44100 -c 2 silence.wav trim 0.0 3.0 - this will create a 3sec stereo silence file. Here n for null file handler, r is the sample rate and c is the number of channels.

Then just lame it:

$ lame silence.wav silence.mp3