Split Your MP3 AudioBook into Bite Size Pieces
(Always Backup your Data Files)
Audio books make big files - even when they’re compressed into the MP3 format. An unabridged book can last for between 12 and twenty hours - maybe more.
Typically you’re going to have a number of files which will last an hour or so.
Now I think that’s not very convenient when you want to load them onto your mp3 player.
I prefer to have files of around a maximum 15 minutes or so as this makes navigation much easier. After all, one of the great things about audio books is that you can listen while waiting for the bus, driving down the road and so on.
If the files are too big, it’s not easy to find your place.
If you’re only going to split one or two files you can do it manually using Audacity or MP3 Cut, but if you have a lot of files it’s better if you can automate the process.
The best completely free programme I’ve found for this is Slice Audio File Splitter:
You can download it here.
Slice Audio File Splitter (http://www.nch.com.au/splitter/index.html)
mp3el (http://www.nch.com.au/components/index.html)
Don’t forget to download the mp3el.dll file and copy it into the Slice directory.
If you don’t use this component, everything will seem to go fine, but there’ll be no sound at the end.
Some time ago I downloaded “The Confessions of Saint Augustine“.
This Audio book has ten files each lasting about one and a quarter hours - It’s really easier to slice these files using a batch process.
Here goes!
First of all, open Slice.
Here’s the screen.
Slice - Screenshot
You need to:
- Add the files you want to split. (I’ve only added one as an example)
- Make an output folder for the split files.
- Decide how to split the files - with an Audio Book you can do this by number or time.
For these files I chose to split into 5 parts which should result in files of about fifteen minutes each.
Slice - Options
Next let’s use the encoder settings to decide on the quality of the output. I prefer to use VBR - Variable Bit Rate - but you may prefer to stick to the standard CBR of about 128 which will provide a good speech recording.
Slice Encoder Settings
When you’ve done all this just press the big Slice button and wait - it may take some time.
Press to Slice
When you’ve finished check your output folder and you should have your Audio Book neatly split into five pieces for each original file - much easier to use on most players.
We’ve concentrated on Audio Books for the moment but I’d like to take a break and in the next few post look at some software issues and some other reading material such as online magazines.
I'm John Rocha, Blog master of Free Books Plus. I just love books
I love lots of books but here I'm emphasising
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John
