How to join MP3 files?

Question

Motivation

I'm looking for a program that allows me to join a lot of mp3 files (an audio book) to a single large mp3 file. My mp3 player is able to remember the position inside a track, but it takes a while to reorganize the database if there are lots of files.

Already tried

I tried some programs (Wave Pad Sound Editor, Audacity), but with these it's all done inside a GUI with lot of manual action.

Question

Does anybody know a program that does this merge as a batch process, or at least without much interaction?

EDIT: I'm only looking for freeware.

EDIT: The software should run on Windows XP.

Solution 1

Two recommended MP3 joiners:

MakeitOne

MakeitOne MP3 Album Maker outshines other joiners for its ability to join the MP3 files and unpack them back to their original state. In either way, the program is a lightning fast mp3 joiner and unpacker that accepts large files.

The MP3 files packed by the program can be played on any MP3 players. It features drag-and-drop files for ease of use and includes a tagging function allowing for adding tags (artist and album title) and the album art to the joined files.

On the downside, it does not support other audio formats than the MP3.

Shuangs Audio Joiner

Shuangs Audio Joiner takes three simple steps to join audio files, Add files in the list, Select Output Format, and Join the files, straight forward, easy to use and effective.

Users are allowed to join MP3, WMA and WAV format files with the program. The MP3 files can be joined using a bitrate ranging from 32 to 320 kbps while WMA files using a bitrate ranging from 48 to 160 kbps.

The user interface shows a small ad panel linking to the developer's homepage but it is not intrusive.

Solution 2

Mp3Wrap:

Mp3Wrap is a free independent alternative to AlbumWrap. It's a command-line utility that wraps quickly two or more mp3 files in one single large playable mp3, without losing filenames and ID3 informations (and without need of decoding/encoding). Also with the possibility of including other non mp3 files, such as PlayLists, info files, cover images, inside the mp3. This means that you obtain a large mp3 that you can split in any moment just using mp3splt and in few seconds you have all original files again! It's useful because files created with Mp3Wrap are easy to download. Infact who downloads has not to know each single song name and easy to play and even if you don't have mp3splt to split file, you can listen to it anyway.

Solution 3

You can do this programmatically with ffmpeg's concat demuxer.

First, create a file called inputs.txt with lines like

file '/path/to/input1.mp3'
file '/path/to/input2.mp3'
file '/path/to/input3.mp3'

...etc. Then, run the following ffmpeg command:

ffmpeg -f concat -i inputs.txt -c copy output.mp3

It's possible to generate inputs.txt easily with a bash for loop (this can probably be done with a Windows batch for loop too), assuming you want to merge the files in alphabetical order

for f in ./*.mp3; do echo "file '$f'" >> inputs.txt; done

Solution 4

Did a quick Google search, and this one might do the trick. I haven't tried it though, as I'm not on a Windows build currently.

Solution 5

bonkencode might be what you're looking for - you select the list of files you want, order them, pick encode as one file, and hit a button. In addition, it also does ripping and conversion to a load of formats

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Comments

[Admin]

For what platform – Windows? Any?

[Admin]

Added Windows XP.

[Sirupsen]

I saw it was shareware, but I supposed you only needed to do this once - sorry! Hope the other answers will work out as a permanent solution for you. :)

[tangens]

Sounds very good, but it doesn't work for me out of the box, so I take the answer of @harrymc. Thanks.

[tangens]

MakeItOne is the kind of program I was looking for. Thank you!

[JC.]

MakeItOne seemed to create a very small pause at join points while Shuangs output was perfect.

[nekno]

Note that the file keyword is now required in front of all the input filenames in the list.

[aliopi]

i had to add -safe 0 because of unsafe file name error. thanks for this simple solution.