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I have a lot audiobooks, each one is usually split into 20-60 files. It's not comfortable to navigate with audio players if I want to group them into some sets by genre (with [Album artist] ID3 tag set to "Various Artists").

Is there free windows or linux tool or set of tools, whose could do the following?

  1. Merge the audiobook files to one mp3 without recoding
  2. Carefully build correct CUE sheet with original ID3 tags pointing to former chapters inside new solid mp3 file.
oguz ismail
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Koguni
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2 Answers2

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Don't use MP3, use Matroska (MKV). It supports all of these chapters and what not.

FFmpeg and mkvmerge are tools you can use for this. Use -c:a copy and the audio won't be re-encoded. (MKV support MP3 as a codec.)

Brad
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  • What about audio players support of Matroska? F.e. standard Android Google Music player or IOS's standard one? – Koguni Sep 29 '17 at 15:41
  • Android, yes. iOS, not by default but you can always build in a Matroska demuxer into your app. – Brad Sep 29 '17 at 16:44
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You can easily join mp3 by simple concatenating them.

   cat file1.mp3 file2.mp3 file3.mp3 file4.mp3 file5.mp3 > file-all.mp3

Tags can be extracted with ffprobe:

   ffprobe file1.mp3

Cue sheets is text files, you can read about its format here:

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_sheet_(computing)

Since here questions related to programming, I will not post complete solution.

bukkojot
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  • MP3 files often contain tags and such. While you can concatenate MPEG streams, this doesn't work in practice. Use FFmpeg or similar tool to extract the streams. – Brad Sep 29 '17 at 04:09
  • It works only with selected audio players and you're lucky not using other players. In other words, concatenating mp3 files instead of streams is loosy and buggy because source mp3's contain headers, ID3 tags even cover images and whatever could be placed there. Resulting file will be frankensteined mix of headers, streams and id3 tags. Also, your approach doesn't fullfill my needs at all because misses recipe of the not so common task - build CUE. And, I know about existense of several concat tools like mp3cat but I need one tool or set of tools to compete my task. – Koguni Sep 29 '17 at 14:27
  • It works in any player which I have, so it enough for me. I know internals of mp3, as I created many multimedia-related software, so I know how and why I can concatenate files. Also, SO is resource for programmers, so write your own tool yourself, I give all need directions. – bukkojot Sep 30 '17 at 02:28
  • You're answering questions not asked, sorry. I didn't asked for programming directions. – Koguni Sep 30 '17 at 12:21