MP3 Chapter Splitter

This utility reads the headers of MP3 audiobook files and splits them according to the information found in the tags. For each original file, it will create a new directory and then create a numbered sequence of files each with a section of the original file. It requires the ffmpeg command line utility to split the files

It is currently written to split files that are downloaded from the Overdrive service from our library. These files store the chapter markers in the UserTextFrames MP3 header. The markers are stored in an xml format:

<Markers>
   <Marker>
      <Name>Episode 5</Name>
      <Time>00:00.000</Time>
   </Marker>
   <Marker>
      <Name>      Episode 5 (03:42)</Name>
      <Time>03:42.227</Time>
   </Marker>
   <Marker>
      <Name>      Episode 5 (04:32)</Name>
      <Time>04:32.093</Time>
   </Marker>
   <Marker>
      <Name>      Episode 5 (05:10)</Name>
      <Time>05:10.067</Time>
   </Marker>
   <Marker>
      <Name>Episode 6</Name>
      <Time>28:04.493</Time>
   </Marker>
   <Marker>
      <Name>      Episode 6 (30:57)</Name>
      <Time>30:57.360</Time>
   </Marker>
   <Marker>
      <Name>      Episode 6 (35:41)</Name>
      <Time>35:41.547</Time>
   </Marker>
</Markers>

Installing

Right now there's not a good way to install it short of cloning or downloading the repo and running it directly from there.

Remember you need to have ffmpeg installed for this tool to work!

Usage

splitter.py will split all files presented on the command line. I usually have a directory where the original MP3 files from overdrive are kept, so running it would look like:

$ ./splitter.py book/*.mp3

Note that this will create a directory in the current directory for each file found and split the contents of the given file into that directory.

The tool also creates a copyit.sh script which will copy each of the files in order to a fixed position on the file system. NOTE: this is currently hard-coded to copy to the position the mp3 player shows up on my machine. Eventually I'll change it to take a parameter (pull requests welcome!).

Status

The project is currently in the "useful tool for me" stage and has not been tested beyond seeing that it works on the files I needed splitting. I did have a pull request to get it working on Windows. I have not tested subsequent releases on windows, but I suspect they work.

If you're interested in more features or have a file it doesn't work with, send me a note or create an issue and I'll see what I can do! I'll happily review pull requests if you've got a change you'd like. Send me a note or create an issue if you'd like help creating a pull request. :)