Bookmark
Recently I obtained an audio book copy of Shawn Achor's book The Happiness Advantage. He is the reader for the audiobook, which is very good because he puts good inflection into the reading.
The book was prepared as two giant, 3+ hour long, MP3 files. When playing long MP3 files with a player such as the iPod nano, this is not ideal because there is no easy way to position to a certain spot in a file. If you get interrupted in listening to the file, there is no way to return to a certain spot in the recording. It is easy to get interrupted in listening to large MP3 files on the nano. This can happen if you browse somewhere else in your music collection, listen briefly to some other item, or the battery runs out.
So I wanted to split the MP3 files down according to sections. I want to make it easy to return to specific sections. For example, I am often realizing in conversations that I want to share something that Shawn said in his book. So I might need to review a specific section as advice for someone I am talking to.
I didn't have any of the Adobe software for splitting audio files.
So I went out to the net to look for something. I found a couple of programs, but I was afraid of getting nagware, trojan downloaders, or some other garbage in my computer. I tried one program from softpedia, and the demo mode would only allow me to make 3 cuts. That wasn't too useful.
So I looked some more, and I finally found this program:
http://mpesch3.de1.cc/index.html
It features a nice waveform display, and easy controls to move back and forth in the file. While the waveform display is not very detailed, it is certainly enough to visually move around in the file. In these MP3 files I was splitting, there was some solid horizontal bars at most of the section breaks that made it easy to put the cut points in.
To put a cut point in, click the mouse on a point in the waveform, then press the delete key. Then you can use the file menu to "Save split..." and it creates a numbered set of MP3 files.
Only problems I noticed:
- On Windows 7, I was not able to install the program in its suggested location of "c:\Program Files (x86)\mp3DirectCut" because it complained that filenames can't have characters like \ in them. So I installed it in c:\temp and that ran just fine.
- The title in all the generated MP3 split files were truncated to the word "The", instead of using the full title from the original file which was "The Happiness Advantage".