Sometimes when dealing with audio files, rather than audio plus video, a more nuanced application than FFmpeg is SoX. Install a fully featured SoX on Ubuntu as follows:
sudo apt-get install sox libsox-fmt-all
And to trim 4 seconds from the end of your mp3 file the following very simple command is required:
sox input.mp3 output.mp3 trim 0 -4
In this example '0' is the starting position at the beginning of the file while '-4' establishes the end position of the required segment: 4 seconds from the end.
Multiple variations on this, with multiple positions and saved segments, are possible. For example, as you have mentioned in the comments, if you only wanted to remove 2 seconds at the beginning of your file the command line would be:
sox input.mp3 output.mp3 trim 2
In this example no end position is required. The SoX man pages contain many more examples of the trim command if you want more complex usage...