Merging MP3 Files
I take no credit for this but this information may well be useful, it was to me!
The Question:
I have an audiobook that’s been separated into a truly stupid 560 files, and I want to combine them in one big file. There’s a million threads about this on Google and its difficult to find good information in any of them so I’m hoping for some clear help for a free way to merge .mp3 files.
The Answer:
You can do this on the command line. Navigate to a folder containing the mp3s. Right click and select Services > New Terminal at Folder. That will open a terminal window. Type cat at the prompt, followed by a space. Don’t hit enter/return. Now go back to the folder with the mp3s in Finder and open it. Get the mp3s in descending order (for example by sorting by name), and then select all of them. Drag the lot you’ve selected over to the Terminal window. Create a space after the last part of the last file name and then type > BigAudioFile.mp3, or whatever you want the single file to be called. Then hit enter. A new mp3 will be created that has combined all the mp3s.
One problem I’ve encountered:
While the newly created mp3 contains all of the individual mp3s combined together, sometimes my iPhone audiobook player will only recognize it as the first of the individual mp3 files (despite the file being much larger than just that first individual file). To address this, I use VLC to “convert” the new big mp3 to a new…big mp3. Something about running it through VLC gets my audiobook player to recognize it as the big complete mp3 that it is.
Further Question:
Thank you for this! It worked for me. One question - How did you “convert” using VLC?
Further Answer:
Go to File > Convert/Stream… . Then hit Open and select the big mp3 file you just created. Then under Choose profile select “Audio - mp3”, click Save as File, and then give it a new name and choose where to save it (add “.mp3” as a suffix). Then hit Go!. VLC will process the file and create a new mp3. For some reason, my ios audiobook player (CloudBeats) will sometimes need me to do this before it’ll treat the large mp3 as containing more than just the content in the first of the many mp3 files you concatenated using the process in terminal.