Hi,
I’m new to Audacity and this forum, so I apologize if this question was already asked. I have a long audio file (documentary) and would like to insert “chapters” so that when I playback the file I can fast forward or rewind by chapter.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading about “Labels” but that seems to split the file up into separate “sub-files”.
Is there a way to achieve what I’m looking to do?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Most digital audio formats don’t support chapters. You my have to find an audio book format and an appropriate audio book player application.
From what I understand, AAC supports chapters, but you’d have to figure-out how to add the chapter information (maybe iTunes?) and your player also has to support them (maybe iTunes/iPod?).
The “shiny disc” formats (CD/DVD/Blu-Ray) all support chapters or track markers.
Most audio formats supports “tags” so you can add a track number to a file. I’ve copied a couple of audio books from CD to MP3 with a separate files for every chapter (and sometimes for a sub-chapters). And, any audio player can play the files in track-number order.
Producing chapters in a sound file is Frequently Requested. Another way to do it is a single-picture video file.
Koz
“Chapter and Verse” is a free Windows program that does exactly what you need:
http://lodensoftware.com/chapter-and-verse/
It will also convert most audio files to AAC, which is the only audio format I know that supports chapters natively. Every player that supports AAC should be able to see chapters. MP4 supports it too, but that is a video container. I have a feeling some audio players might not support chapters, but I’ve never tried it.
Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and Opus formats can use an extension to support chapters:
https://wiki.xiph.org/Chapter_Extension
However, a lot of players didn’t support this last time I looked.
An overview of possible solutions, from the Auphonic blog:
https://auphonic.com/blog/2013/07/03/chapter-marks-and-enhanced-podcasts/
I’ve never tried Auphonic, which is a webservice, free for up to two hours/month. Of course, Auphonic can add chapters too and it does a lot of other stuff too. Some of it sounds like snake oil, like “clipping removal”, fi.