When it comes down to my car’s MP3 player, seeking is the most painful capability—it’s limited to 2x-speed, which is disasterous for seeking to the 45m point of a podcast that’s 90m long. Yes, it’s terrible.
mp3splt to the rescue
If you could roughly split an MP3 into ten-tracks wherever there’s enough silence, you could divide each podcast into ten “rough” chapters. It turns out that there’s a nice CLI utility for doing this, called mp3splt. Here is how I invoke it with a shell function:
function podsplt()
{
mp3splt -s -p nt=10,th=-50 "$1" \
-d `basename "$1" .mp3`
}
This explodes the MP3 into ten tracks in its own directory, ready to go on any USB or disc media your MP3 player accepts. If you need to change the number of “chapters”, adjust the nt=10 parameter, e.g. nt=15 if you want 15-tracks. If the audio is noisy, raise the silence “floor” with the th=-50 paramter, e.g. th=-40.
Get mp3splt from http://mp3splt.sourceforge.net
