I had multiple mp3 audio tracks of a lecture. They worked fine in iTunes since I could create a playlist and tracks would play one after another. I moved the tracks to my phone to listen to them on the move, but the phone has some weired sorting method that played the tracks in wrong order. So I needed to combine these tracks in one.
Tried with GarageBand first. Placing one track after another. This got a bit tricky, and somehow did not allow me to add tracks after a particular number of seconds of playback. I don’t know why it happened like that, but importing and adjusting tracks in GarageBand was taking too much time, so I abandoned it.
Did a bit of Googling around to see what else is possible. Found that if I had QuickTime Pro, I could join the tracks into a single file by copy pasting them into a new audio track. I do not have QT Pro so this wouldn’t work.
Found a $10 software called iTunesJoin that could do the trick. Obviously, the task wasn’t worth that money!
And hey, on a forum posting that initially looked useless, I found the gem! You can simply cat mp3 files!
So the following command in Terminal:
cat *.mp3 > newfile.mp3
Will join all your mp3 files in the current directory. It’s a simple file concatenation operation. Multiple mp3 files stringed together work like one big file! Even if they had multiple ID3 tags, it worked for me. I just added a new ID3 tag using iTunes once the file was created.
Later, I also got Join Together on Doug’s Applescript for iTunes library. BTW, this library has tons of useful AppleScripts.
I can happily move the file to my phone now! I just wished Windows XP within Parallels detected my phone!
7 comments ↓
Have you tried Audacity?
Yes. Even found an article that described how to combine mp3s using Audacity. But I was looking for something much simpler! Something that would do the job without me putting in efforts
Cat is simple than all $* software. Cat has supercow power!! You can even,
cat /dev/cdrom > MyCD.iso
hey im a cat newbie more cat suggestions , i luv my terminal commands
You can do it from the DOS command line, at least in XP and down. Type “copy /b 1.mp3 2.mp3 3.mp3 c:\NewFile.mp3″. The /b switch forces the command to read the entire binary file. And I rename the files to something easily typed and then use a tagger to straighten them back out. This is usefull for audio-books where they can have several sub-chapters and you just want the whole chapter as one file.
used
For some reason the plus symbols didnt show up in the above post. There should be a plus-sign (shuft-equals key) between 1.mp3(plus)2.mp3(plus)3.mp3, etc.
I just did this in vista and it works great.
By the way: copy /? will print the help, which showed me that I could coyp the files with wildcards: copy /b *.mp3 MyAlbum.mp3 which worked like a charm.
Thanks used and mehta!
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