[geeks] favorite mp3 splitter/joiner/editor?

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 05:41:17PM -0500, Sandwich Maker wrote:
>anyone have a suggestion?
>
>i've just ripped an audiobook, 12 cds unabridged.  thanks to itunes, i
>can join tracks to make one mp3 per chapter - mostly; you can't join
>tracks across discs, so i wind up with part 1 / part 2 for some
>chapters.  but that's a minor annoyance; this is the first audiobook
>where they end and begin chapters in the middle of a track, and that's
>really bothersome when i'm trying to organize by chapter.
>
>my budget closely approximates $0.  my platform is xp, with osx 10.3
>possible.  an editor that works at the mp3 frame level is fine; i
>don't need to monkey with the audio, just split and join files.

I've never heard of one. 

BTW, if you ripped it with iTunes are you sure it is MP3? The default is AAC,
which is a very different codec. 

There are plenty of editing suites, Audacity works fine. It's a Linux program,
but there is a decent port to Windows. There may also be a BSD (Xwindows under
MacOS) or a direct MacOS port too.

>after several days of searching i've found a raft of possibles, but i
>haven't found one yet that handles id3v2 tags.  i like mp3directcut
>except for that.  visual mp3 splitter ran second, but another also-ran
>had one feature i liked - counting frames, instead of time.  it gave
>me warm fuzzies, though they all say they work on frame boundaries.

>
>i could go round robin hood's barn and use mp3tags to translate
>itunes' v2 tags to v1 then back to v2 after snipping, but information
>is lost.

AFAIK iTunes does not tag a file. It creates seperate XML tags in a file
of tags for your entire database. Works great with 100 MP3's, sucks when you
have 30k.

As for the audio books, I wrote a PERL program that strips off the MP3 tags,
uncompresses the files and combines them so that I have single files around 90
minutes long. Then it recompresses them as low bit rate mono files, with more
appropriate tags and file names.

Not 100% automatic, but once set up it just runs. I run it under Linux, but
you could probably get it to work under BSD (MacOS shell) if you had the id3
stripper, mpg123 (or mpg321) and LAME. 

You probably could get it to work under SFU too, but I've not tried it.

Geoff.


-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM