Most people have probably just moved on to streaming, but I still have thousands of mp3s sitting on my harddrive. In order to tidy things up a bit, I’m looking for a software that I can use to merge / join various mp3s together.
Basically I want to open a folder / drag and drop files (eg 10 files) and then the software outputs them - in the correct order - to a single file. Now these files don’t need to be un or recompressed or converted, just stuck together. Hoping there’s something out there that does this quick and without any fuss? (ideally free since it doesn’t seem to be that complicated a thing…)
I guess I could use Audacity to drop all the audiotracks onto a timeline and then save, convert…etc but that is just too much hassle for what I’m wanting to do.
I remember doing this pretty frequently with a Winamp plugin years ago. Winamp lets you choose distinct plugins for input and output streams, and for the output stream, you could choose a plugin which outputs a playlist of many songs to a single file instead of outputting audio to speakers.
I join MP3s together all the time to make looping playlists. I can also see the utility of doing that with tracks that are a series of podcasts (especially shorter podcasts) so that when you’re on a run/ride/working out for more than an hour, you don’t have to worry about fiddling with it to get the podcasts you want to play in the order you’d like.
I can’t speak for doing it with stuff like podcasts, but for music, I use a joiner to create a looping playlist that can do crossfades, because I can manually set the crossfade in/out with different tracks, and I can do that much better than Spotify or any other commercial streaming service/mp3 player can.
Sounds cool, and for a good part of my listening, Spotify is perfect! But what happens if I wanna listen to songs from multiple artists, from different albums, in a specific order, with multiple songs/versions/artists not present on Spotify, Itunes, or Google music?
Fully realize that I’m an edge case user here, but that’s why they make this software, I suppose, for drips like me. Can’t imagine it’s profitable though. I paid $4.95 for my Absolute MP3 Splitter/Joiner software back in 2006, and have been using it since. Definitely have gotten my five bucks worth from it.
