Thursday, May 10, 2007

Good audio book - but I'd like to chop it up. Any Suggestions?

While perusing the comments on a Digg post about Richard Dawkins, a link was posted to a freely downloadable mp3 file containing the audiobook version of Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World. I started listening to it this morning and have done enough driving as of lunchtime to reach the two hour mark.  So far it's a really interesting and thought provoking narration of science and society. The whole thing is listed as 13hrs and 19min long (!). It's a 137MB download no less.

Therein lies the problem. I am appealing to anyone out there who might know of an automated way to split any given mp3 file into a number of chunks. I could do this in Audacity manually, but for something this size an automated splitter app would do wonders.

As I've mentioned in the past, I burn my podcast mp3 files onto an mp3 CD-RW which I then listen to in the car. The  fast-forward and rewind capabilities of the car deck are fully capable for a 4 minute music file, but they become clunky and extremely inefficient when you're talking about 30 minutes let alone 13 hours. ;)

I like the audiobook, but it would be nice to be able to stop and listen to some music files or something else for a while and then come back at least close to where I left off. So I'm thinking of splitting it into half-hour or 15 minute chunks. Anybody know of a free and effective tool for the job?

If I found an effective solution I'd probably run the splitter on any podcast longer than an hour since it's been more than once that I've inadvertently forwarded to the next track when trying to skip ahead a minute or two.. doh!



2 comments:

Unknown said...

I'm seeing mp3 splitter (http://sourceforge.net/projects/mp3splitter/) and mp3 splt (http://mp3splt.sourceforge.net/mp3splt_page/home.php) which seem to be potential alternatives for linux. I haven't used either but had an extra minute or two to snoop around to see what's out there.

RichardQuerin said...

Thanks for the comment nate. Another friend of mine heathenx just emailed me as well with the same link (the mp3splt one).

Thanks for the quick help guys!

Silly me. Why would I ever think it would be a hard thing to do? Especially in Linux.