7

I'm looking for a way to simply concatenate podcasts episodes from a RSS feed into a single audio file.

I'm looking for cool features like adding 2 seconds of silence between each episode, or specify when to cut to skip credits, etc.

Do you know some editors that can do it, either on Windows or Linux, or should I handle this myself with some ffmpeg commands?

2
  • I think ffmpeg is the simplest option, especially if you have a large number of episodes. It would be cool if you post your resulting script
    – Tymric
    Aug 4, 2015 at 13:52
  • Is command-line OK? Do you need a UI? You need software that makes this simple, not a general-purpose sound editor, right?
    – Nicolas Raoul
    Mar 16, 2016 at 7:28

3 Answers 3

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The simplest way is just to use the Unix cat command like

cat podcast1.mp3 podcast2.mp3 podcast3.mp3 > megacast.mp3

MP3 files are just audio and any headers or MP3 tags in the other files will just be a microsecond of static if you can hear it at all.

You could also record 2s of silence with Sound Recorder into silence.mp3 and use

cat podcast1.mp3 silence.mp3 podcast2.mp3 silence.mp3 podcast3.mp3 > megacast.mp3

If you want to get fancy, you could skip the beginning/end of a podcast with

tail -c +1000 podcast1.mp3 > trimmed.mp3

where -c means use bytes and +1000 is the number of bytes. You'd have to experiment with the number of bytes to find how long the intro is. To trim the end, use

head -c -1000 podcast1.mp3 > trimmed.mp3

and experiment with the number 1000. Run tail --help and head --help to see useful suffixes for the bytes like kb, mb, etc.

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GStreamer would be the way to go but I doubt that it would fit your requirement of "simple". Whilst it will certainly do what you want it to do, the learning curve can be quite steep, although that said, there is a mountain of documentation out there for it.

1
  • Please describe the exact steps in more details, thanks!
    – Nicolas Raoul
    Mar 16, 2016 at 7:29
-3

you can use Audacity to concatenate multiple audio files, but as far as I know all the manipulations you described must be done manually.

1
  • 1
    Please describe the exact steps in more details, thanks!
    – Nicolas Raoul
    Mar 16, 2016 at 7:29

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