Software for merging MP3's or audio files?

[Tunnelcat]

Is there any good free program that will allow me to merge, not edit, mp3's or other audio files into one long song with small gaps in between the separate songs, kind of like burning a CD, but in digital format that is simple to use? I've cut a bunch of mp3's of single soundtracks that I want to merge under the original album titles like an LP.

[CDN_Merlin]

http://www.freemake.com/free_audio_converter/

[Tunnelcat]

Thanks CDN_Merlin, but I have to slap myself in the head for this one. I already have Foobar2000, and it happens to have the option of merging files during the conversion process. Well duh!

[Top Gun]

One caveat to this plan is that, if you're merging a bunch of separate MP3 files into a new longer MP3 file, you're going to experience some additional quality loss, since you're basically compressing the original data twice. If you have access to the original CDs or lossless files (WAV or FLAC, usually), it'd be best to merge those instead, since you'd only need to do a single encoding.

[fliptw]

foobar dumps to wav, merges, then burns.

[Krom]

But if you aren't burning it to a CD, then its a lossy to lossy conversion which always consumes some quality in the process (you cannot just stitch MP3s together without re-compressing them).

[fliptw]

you can, you combine the frames that contain the audio.

google lossless mp3 editing.

[Tunnelcat]

One caveat to this plan is that, if you're merging a bunch of separate MP3 files into a new longer MP3 file, you're going to experience some additional quality loss, since you're basically compressing the original data twice. If you have access to the original CDs or lossless files (WAV or FLAC, usually), it'd be best to merge those instead, since you'd only need to do a single encoding.

What I want to do for example, is have Foobar take my original 3 wav files and merge them during the conversion to one longer mp3. Is there still more loss going on in this case? Is Foobar converting each wav file to mp3 and then reconverting to mp3 again for the longer file? I tried one set and I didn't notice any degradation of the sound quality.

What I'm trying to do is essentially create a movie soundtrack album. Windows puts all the audio files in alphabetical order, so I can't have the songs play in their original order because the file names don't always end up in the same order as in the album. These files are going on a USB stick for my car radio, which is kind of dumb and always plays things in alphabetical order, not from a nicely ordered playlist like an iPod does. I'd rather leave a tiny unobtrusive USB stick plugged in all the time instead of an iPod, which would tempt thieves.

[Top Gun]

Oh, if you're going from separate WAV files to one long MP3, you should be fine. If the player has that merge function built in, I imagine it'd put them all together before doing the actual encode.

And I wasn't even aware of what fliptw referred to, but apparently there's a way to straight-up append MP3 files without quality loss too. Learn something every day.

[Tunnelcat]

Yeah, Foobar is pretty slick. It will take any number of .wav files (I'm sure there's a limit though) and encode them in the order you have them in the list and create one longer mp3 file. I may not be able to author the names of each individual song in the file, but with soundtrack albums, who cares. I just name the file with the album name. What matters is that they are played in the order they were on the original album.

[fliptw]

if its played in alphabetical order, you can just put numbers at the front of the file names...

heck, foobar can do that for you.

Run the installer again, make sure you select the File Operations under optional features.

then you can select the files you want to copy, right click, file operations, then put this in as the filename pattern field:

Code: Select all

%list_index%-%filename%

[Krom]

Like for instance the track numbers... Tip: Don't use WAV, convert them to FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) which supports metadata tagging, then you can just select all the tracks of an album and have foobar look up the disk on the freedb and automatically tag all the files, then you can sort by album/track/artist/title/etc whatever you like and you can control the playback order in foobar from random to default (which just starts at the top of the playlist and works its way down). And for an added bonus, they could end up talking half as much space as the uncompressed wav files with no loss in quality. I only use MP3s for portable devices anymore, for the original disk copies I store them in FLAC.

You can even have foobar automatically rename the actual files using information gathered from the tags.