[geeks] favorite mp3 splitter/joiner/editor?

[Sandwich Maker]

" From: "Geoffrey S. Mendelson" <gsm at mendelson.com>
" 
" 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.

i should add, it's also very silly when tracks are only ~5m +/- 1 or
so.

" >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. 

i wasn't originally looking for one, but they turned up in my srch for
editors.  mp3 is apparently compressed in 'frames' - chunks - and if
you snip or join [same rate files] on frame boundaries, you only have
to reset the size field in the tag.  this fits my needs.

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

mp3, 64k/22k joint stereo.  in hindsight i could've set it to 32k mono
and cut the size in half since it's just an actor reading the book,
but the 12 cds came down to 400M as it is.

" 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.

[]

" 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.

hmmm...  this book has 35 chapters, many ~30m...
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