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.

A Typewritten Journal & Digital Extracts

Digital Extraction

If sufficient care is taken in terms of storage conditions, physical and fire security, an analogue paper journal should remain readable and accessible for many years, possibly decades or even centuries. Richard Polt, typewriter aficionado and thinker wrote to me, “Digital journals seem like a contradiction to me - the documents are just too liable to disappear or become unreadable”. I have experienced this myself with old word processing files which I can no longer access, had those letters been written on a typewriter who knows, I may well still be able to read their contents today.

I wrote in a previous short article “A Typewritten Journal & The Atoma Notebook’’ about the system I have adopted for my journal writing, this short article takes this a step further and describes my process for extracting segments from my journal for use in the digital world. It cannot be ignored that sometimes a digital version of something written on a typewriter can be a convenience, especially if the majority of one’s writing is done on a manual typewriter, as is now the case for me.

Apart from the ability to conveniently share text, the facility to create a digital version of material from a typewritten journal may protect against loss or destruction in the event of a flood or fire. A digital version of analogue material can always be returned to a paper (though not original) version if required, if the original typewritten version has been destroyed.

Another issue I wanted to overcome is that without a complex and extensive indexing system analogue data can be difficult to access, we all remember the frustrations of the libraries of old I am sure. However, if a typewritten journal is given the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) treatment, even selectively, that journal then becomes immediately searchable and this can be invaluable.

The simple method of OCR analysis I use makes use of Google Photos and Google Lens, Google Lens is built into the Google Photos application and can be used on pretty much any smartphone these days, it is available free of charge. For the purpose of extracting segments of text from my journal I find it simpler and quicker to use a smartphone rather than a dedicated scanner. Doing it this way I can capture a segment of text even whilst the paper is still in the typewriter, publish it, and then just carry on typing.

The method I use is extremely simple. I generate the typewritten text and then simply point the smartphone camera, and capture a photo. Having captured a photo I open that photo with the Google Photos application, the application will recognise the text in the image as soon as I select the Google Lens option which is available at the foot of the screen as a “square with a dot in the centre” icon, as shown in the photo above.

Once the text has been recognised the application offers the option to “select all” text, with that selected the text can be copied to the clipboard for use elsewhere by simply pasting the text into a document, social media, or whatever is required. If the user is using Google Chrome and the browser is logged in as the same user as the Google Photos application the option is presented to copy the text to a computer and if this is selected the text is immediately copied to the computer clipboard, this is the way I tend to work.

Using this process I find it is simple to quickly, conveniently and accurately extract typewritten text from my journal for use elsewhere. This process also allows me to make far more use of my typewriters to generate text because for many reasons I prefer to work this way. It also allows me to selectively digitise only some of my text so that some of it remains strictly “analogue only” and therefore impervious to hacking, theft etc.

Confidentiality is of course extremely important and is one of my primary reasons for using a typewriter. For this reason I only photograph sections of text that I intend to put into the public domain anyway, such as this short article. It is also my intention to scan, on a monthly basis, all the pages of my journal as a means of protecting them from damage or destruction, by retaining a digital version should a disaster strike. This digital version will also allow my journal to be searched for keywords which is important to me and which I cannot achieve with a handwritten or wholly analogue system.

In the end it looks as if in the future the vast majority of my writing will be done with a manual typewriter but that this will all be protected by retaining a digital version which I can search. My ATOMA notebook system is going to be the repository for pretty much everything that I generate in written form, certainly my journal, important letters etc. I will stick with messaging services and email for unimportant writing but anything that really matters or that I want to be confident I can get back to in years to come will be typewritten, on paper, with a digital version extracted as required.

Typed on an Imperial Good Companion Model T. The machine was made in Leicester, England in 1939. I have no commercial relationship with ATOMA, I simply buy their products.

A Typewritten Journal & The Atoma Notebook

Typewritten Page

For more years than I care to remember I have toyed with the idea of writing a journal and from time to time I have actually managed to make some progress. My efforts started almost inevitably with a paper diary which was written in longhand but it wasn’t long before I started to run out of steam and the process withered on the vine, until the next time of course.

Over the years I stopped and I started. I experimented with any number of different types of notebook, different pens, different types of paper, you know the score. I bought and tried Moleskine notebooks, Evernote notebooks, Whitelines notebooks, pretty much all of them have passed through my hands and under my pen(s) at one time or another. For me, as well as writing a journal, the whole process itself was important and I found myself concentrating just as hard, in fact probably harder, on finding the perfect “system” for writing my journal, rather than actually writing it.

It may well be familiar to others but I was always in pursuit of the “perfect” system, if such a thing exists. I wanted to be able to settle on a system that I would be able to use for years into the future without suddenly finding that the system I had settled upon was no longer available, it’s format had changed, it had been updated or in some other way had been “improved” in comparison with the system I had originally chosen, it has all been very frustrating.

You will have gathered from my mention above of the Evernote and Whitelines systems that I have had many a dalliance with various technology based “solutions” to writing in a journal, none of which have truly delivered what I had initially hoped they would.

I have tried a number of phone/tablet based options to record my trials and tribulations, one of the more recent ones, and one that lasted quite a while, was the DayOne system but I still felt that something was missing. I think the fundamental problem, for me at least, of technology based solutions has been the fact that it all lacks “feel” and authenticity. I find that if I type my journal into a phone or tablet my words just seem to have disappeared never to be seen again and if I’m honest the whole thing just became a chore to me which I ceased to enjoy. I needed something founded in reality, not a virtual record somewhere in “The Cloud”.

TYPEWRITER, enter stage left. I have always liked typewriters, I like the sound, I like the authenticity, I like the mechanics and I like their longevity. I could go on but there are many reasons for me liking typewriters. It seemed to me that if I decided to type out my journal using a vintage typewriter that settled one side of the problem, no more looking for the perfect pen. I played around for a few days and realised quickly that this was the right solution for me, it just felt “right”. A typewritten journal it was then, but what about the recording medium?

ATOMA notebook, enter stage right. The choice of the recording medium itself was going to be very important, I was in this for the long haul and I wanted to be as sure as I possibly could be that what I started buying now was going to be available in 5, 10 and maybe 20 years time, or at least there had to be a fighting chance that it would be. I was looking for something with a pedigree and hopefully a future.

After much thought and exploration I settled on the ATOMA system, the company itself has been going for over 70 years having started in 1948, this gave me some confidence that it was hopefully going to be around for the long term. The company is Belgian and the product range is relatively modest, which I like.

The key feature of the ATOMA system is that it is a disc binding system which means that pages can be removed from a binder and replaced, a bit like a ring binder only better. This system allows you to remove pages and replace them in different orders, to also use smaller format pages in the same notebook and to simply insert them where you like and also to use the special punch to produce your own sheets or to add external material to your journal if required. Sadly the dedicated ATOMA punch is not a cheap item, it is expensive, but there are alternatives I believe, I bit the bullet and bought one.

The all-important paper itself is available in plain paper, lined, chequered, dotted and there are also other inserts available. I use the cream plain paper for my writing and it works very well for me. I simply remove a sheet from the binder, pop it into the typewriter, and type away, when I’m finished it simply slips back into the binder. The paper is 90gsm and I find that I can type on both sides of the paper without any problems at all which is a big plus for me.

I am now completely settled on my journal system, it’s a manual typewriter and an ATOMA notebook and paper from here on, the final decision has been made and I’m delighted. It is nice to know that in five year’s time I know that I will still be using the same system and I love seeing a real journal appearing out of the typewriter, one character at a time.

I love the fact that there is a direct physical conversion of my thoughts into ink embedded into the paper via my muscles and the mechanical linkages in this old machine. No distractions, no alteration of my words and errors by a computer algorithm, no grammatical suggestions and no spellings being altered. I’ve even reverted to using a proper dictionary to look things up myself so that I don’t have to interact with technology at all as I write, I leave my telephone in another room.

In purely practical terms I put a piece of paper into the machine in the morning and type on and off during the day adding as I wish, as things happen, and when I feel like it. At the end of the day the paper comes out of the machine and goes back into its binder. With this system I am finding writing a journal easy and an absolute pleasure.

Seeing a little record of my life slowly appearing in a bound book as each day passes is something I enjoy and will have no problem continuing with, this system works for me. If I want a segment of my writing in a digital format I have a very simple process for that so that I now type up pretty much everything in my notebook/journal on a manual typewriter and just extract the text I want in a digital format as required, that’s for the next short article.

Typed on an Imperial Good Companion Typewriter Model T. The machine was made in Leicester, England in 1939. I have no commercial relationship with ATOMA, I simply buy their products.