Easy way to concatenate a bunch of audio files?

[DinkyDogg]

Is there an easy way to concatenate a bunch of audio files in Audacity? I've ripped an audiobook from 5 CDs to FLAC files, and I have around 70 of them. Is there an easy way to join all of them into one big FLAC file?

The only way I could find was to drag one clip to the end of the previous one in Audacity, and that's too tedious to do for the entire thing.

[steve]

To avoid having to do a lot of manual manipulation, you could use a suitable CD burning program to create a very large CD, but rather than burning a standard CD which is limited to 70 minutes, burn to an iso file. Then mount the iso file as a virtual drive and rip it as a single audio file.

To do it in Audacity, the quickest way that I can think of is to import your files (Ctrl + Shift +I), and check that they are in the correct order (if not, you will either need to rename them before importing, or import them one at a time).

You now have 70 tracks (I hope you have lots of free disk space) in chronological order.

Select track 2 (click on it's info box)
Press Ctrl + X
Press the "End" key
Press Ctrl + V

Select track 3
....
...

Repeat 68 times.

[DinkyDogg]

Thanks for the reply. I found a simple way to do the concatenation in Goldwave, a different audio editing program, but unfortunately that means I need to have a copy of windows around as Goldwave is windows only. But that's still easier than manually joining this many files in Audacity.

I found a command line utility called shntool that can do it, but the problem is, it doesn't update the header with the length of the concatenated file. When I try to play the file in Amarok (the music player I use) I can't seek to a point midway through the file because it doesn't know when the file ends. When I try to open the file in Audacity, it crashes.

Any suggestions on how I might be able to fix the header on the concatenated FLAC file?

[steve]

What I should have asked "why do you want to do that?"

I presume that it is so that you have the convenience of playing the whole thing through in one go?
Why not use a Play List?

[DinkyDogg]

I usually listen to audiobooks on my iPod running Rockbox, and it's more convenient to have one big audiobook file than a bunch of small tracks. Rockbox can be set to remember your place, and that's easier than trying to remember which track you were on.

[steve]

I don't use RockBox, so I don't know its abilities or limitations, but you are saying that RockBox can remember its previous position in a file, but cannot remember its previous position in a PlayList?

When you start a PlayList, does it just add the playlist to the queue as a single item, or as a list of tracks? If it adds them as a list of tracks, then in order to remember your place when you stop listening, couldn't you just need to save the current queue as a new playlist. Perhaps not quite as convenient as having RockBox remembering it automatically, but a lot more convenient than using Audacity to concatenate 70 flac files (which requires a lot of user interaction).

[steve]

Update - you can do what you are asking for with foobar2000, but again it is a Windows program. Apparently it works well with WINE.

[DinkyDogg]

Ah, thanks. I had seen the program but ignored it when I found out it was for Windows. I'll give it a try with WINE.

In the meantime, I also did the concatenation with Goldwave, which worked fine. Maybe this feature will show up in future Audacity releases.

[steve]

Here's the WINE page about foobar2000 http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.p ... n&iId=1749

[jan.kolar]

Too late but anyway: What about to convert to RAW format (any kind, just no headers), then
copy file file file file... file ten.raw
copy ten.raw ten.raw .... ten.raw 70.raw
of some sort?
(DOS: copy /b file+file+file.... ten.raw)
(Unix: cat file file ... >ten.raw (mostly works binary))

And then convert from raw to whatever.mp3.

AND ONE MORE - THE EASIST:
Lets simply concatanet MP3, if we do not need any reliability.
(Don't know much about mp3 but perhaps has some chunks headers and/or sycn marks.)
The following did work for me, I tried on some tiny Audacity export.mp3:
cat tmpyy.mp3 tmpyy.mp3 tmpyy.mp3 tmpyy.mp3 tmpyy.mp3 > tmpzzz.mp3
(playback with Windows Media Something with about tiny pause,
Audacity import shows 10 ms nonsense sound plus 50 ms silence)