How to put (book)marks into a whole MP3

Special Interest Groups Making Music
1

I have a whole mp3 with multiple songs (or any kind of single registrations). I want to keep whole the mp3 but I want to mark where the single songs begin, so I could press the next song in the player to reach the next songs, or I could let it play without interruption. Compare the situation with the example in the wiki: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/creating_and_selecting_labels.html
In this way I can split with labels (exporting multiple) but instead of splitting I would like to let it a whole file mp3 with a kind of bookmarks.
Is it possible?
Thank you.
Pier Luigi

2

There is no “standard” way to do that, though there are some non-standard ways that work on some media players. For example, iTunes supports “chapters”, but these chapter marks are not supported by other media players.

One thing that you can do which is widely supported by many media players, is to export each song as a separate file, and include a “play list” file. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M3U

3

iTunes supports “chapters”

It also supports Playlists which sounds a lot like what you want. Open the playlist on your player and you can skip around to any song or Next-Next-Next.

No, there’s no stand-alone sound format that does that.

Oddly you can program that in web page HTML. Open the “show” in any browser and jump around however you want or however good you are at programming HTML.

I think that’s how they handle podcasts. It’s XML instead of HTML, but the effect is the same. Your collection shows up and you can step forward at random, or just let it play.

Koz

4

So, the exemple for creating labels in the Wiki (about an interview), is useful only to work with Audacity. It isn’t?

In my case, I digitalized an old tape with bird songs and a voice that introduce the bird that has this “song”, so not always between two songs there is a silent and if I would split them I could interrupt the sentence of the explainer voice.
Thanks.
Pier Luigi

5

There’s about 1000 pages in the wiki. Which one are you referring to?

If you create labels in an Audacity Project, you can use those labels with “Export Multiple” (https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/export_multiple.html) to create individual files. With those files, you can then create an audio CD with separate tracks, or you can create a playlist for media players.

6



I referred to the link in my first post:
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/creating_and_selecting_labels.html

7

Thanks.

The rest of my reply still applies, but note that if it is more convenient to do so, you can also use “point labels” (at the start of each section) with Export Multiple.

8

Thank you.
Everything is clear. I understood the “exporting multiple”.
But why, in addition to the “exporting multiple”, not let create a single whole file with marks to go from a song to the next song?
For exemple: in a live CD, I could listen to that in succession without fade out after every song, or I could go to the songs I prefer by pressing the “next button”.
I’m not an expert and could be not possible to program something like that…

9

Because there is no standard way to do that.
If you use iTunes, then you can add iTunes “chapter” markers, and that will work in iTunes, but not in Windows Media Player.
If you use M4B format, you can use chapter tags that are supported in “some” (but not all) audiobook players.
There’s probably other systems too, but there is no “standard” way to add track markers to MP3 files.