Would a ( Would a (nother) MP3 splitter be a tool you use?nother) MP3 splitter be a tool you use? [Archive]

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Darksoul71

27th October 2005, 20:46

Hi all,

I´m the developer of BeCutter, a GUI for BeSplit, which automates MP3 splitting using predefined intervals. While BeSplit does a quite nice job in splitting rather HiQ MP3 (e.g. Stereo / 44.1 kHz / 128 kBit), it simply causes big problems on the LowQ MP3´s you´ll often find in the www such as Audioplays or Audiobook (BTW: Please no comments that I refer "warez" as there are quite a lot websites providing execellent free audiobook of older book). The splitted MP3s often have distorted sound at the end or (even worse) a few second are missing.

FIO: http://besweet.notrace.dk/BeCutter.zip

Q: Why would someone need to split MP3´s ?
A: Imagine a MP3 which is 2 hours long, you have a CD MP3 player which doesn´t store the position you stopped it. Now you listen lets say 30 min on your way to work. My guess would be that on your way back home in the evening you wanna listen to the MP3 right where you stopped listening in the morning.
..but wait: Almost any portable MP3 CD player I know does neither store his latest track or position. So you would have to use fastforward to continue listening on your latest position. Depening on the speed your player "fastforwards" this might take several minutes. What a PITA !

Q: Is it lossless ?
A: No ! Lossy2lossy compression will never be lossless, but since KutMP3 outputs to 128 kBit MP3 you´ll mostly not notice this. Esp. when you keep in mind that my main focus is splitting MP3s for temporary storage on a portable device -> you´ll mostly listing to them using a rather cheap headset or in your car anyhow -> loss in quality not really audible.

I´ll use this tool also for all the old tapes I´ve converted to MP3 on the fly using HDDOgg. Same problem here: Long playtime in one big file makes it hard to forward to a specific position (unless you are sitting in front of your PC dragging the position slider of your favourite MP3 player :)).

Q: How does KutMP3 work ?
A: KutMP3 is using AVISynth combined with AVS2WAV and BeSplit to do it´s job. First the MP3 file selected gets "wrapped" in a AVISynth file with fake video (black screen) using the mpasource.dll. After this KutMP3 calculates the "video segments" which need to be generated for each separate file. It generates "n" separate AVISynth files for "n" audio segments. All segments are number consecutively and 5 minutes long. I´ve choosen this approach since the source code used is somewhat of a spin-off from my tool "Komprezz2DVD" which automates encoding from AVI/MPEG2 sources to DVD-compliant streams (supporting cutlists generated with VirtualDub). Of course I´m aware that it would be a simpler approach generating a wave file from the selected MP3 using BeSweet, "cutting" it on wave-base and re-encoding to MP3 with BeSweet but implementing KutMP3 took me something like 90 mins !

Disadvantages:
* You have to have AVISynth, VirtualDubMod, BeSweet and AVS2WAV installed :)
* Lossy2Lossy compression (<- personally I don´t care as long as I don´t notice anything).

Advantages:
* Free software
* Works without any noticable distorstions. At least the few files I tested yesterday played back fluently without any gaps in between. Listening to multiple concatenated MP3 files was like listening to one big file.
* Source code available. Feel free to enhance if you like.

Final words:
If I release KutMP3, there will be no support. No "Yes, I´m gonna implement the stuff that you want."
.
KutMP3 was done to fulfill my requirements. Nothing more, nothing less. Also supporting wave input could also be nice for those of you that want to convert their tapes to MP3 with the least loss in quality and don´t want to mess around with splitting the recorded wave for each song.

Of cource KutMP3 could be easily modified to output to any audio format BeSweet supports (ogg, aac) or another format if you use an external encoder with batch interface.

Later,
D$

daphy

28th October 2005, 06:19

Slogra

28th October 2005, 09:52

Did you know "kut" is very much used swearing word in holland?

Darksoul71

28th October 2005, 17:37

Hm, two "meaningfull" answers....

Guess I keep "KutMP3" on my HD...

Thnx,
D$

communist

28th October 2005, 18:13

Q: Is it lossless ?
A: No !

As someone already mentioned mp3directcut I might aswell add that it can cut mp3s without recompressing them. You can also add fade in / fade out (lossless again). This is achieved by altering the gain values that can be edited - just like in mp3gain.

So another mp3 split tool wouldn be much of use to me atleast - as the available tools do their job pretty good.

Darksoul71

29th October 2005, 08:05

@communist:
daphy missed my points as well as slogra.
My tool is primarily used for temporary splitting of MP3 for mobilie listening. Lossy splitting doesn´t count for me if I don´t hear it.

Also two other thing weren´t answered:
Does mp3direct allow automatic cutting points lets say for every 5 minutes ? From my quick look at it I would say no.

Does mp3direct allow mass batch processing (e.g splitting 40 files into 5 min chunks with only a few mouse clicks) ? My guess would be no.

Also most lossless MP3 cutter fail when I try to split a few older, very rare audioplays recorded from the radio I got from someone. They are encoded at a very low bitrate.

...but well: It was just a question. I´m not in the mood to advertise stuff. As often:
* Done it for me
* Ask if someone would like it
* If not: Keep it.
-> Less users means less problems in terms of bug hunting, writting documentation , etc.

Have a good weekend,
D$

lonewolf32

15th November 2005, 22:40

Just wanted to say thanks to the developer of BeCutter. You are exactly right about the issues with long MP3 files. In this day and age of podcasting (I listen to 4 podcasts regularly) long MP3 files are very common all of a sudden. And I listen to the podcasts in my car using the CD player. What happens is, you listen to half of a podcast then for some reason you change discs, or someone else drives the car, and boom, you lost your spot. My car's ff capability is super slow so it takes several minutes at times to get back to where I left off.

I had been experimenting with free mp3/file splitters I found online. There are a lot of them, but most of them that I found are demos only, you eventually have to pay. The two free ones I found work OK but have shortcomings. The first one I found would name the files file1.mp3.1, file1.mp3.2, etc, so I'd have to manually rename all the files after. The second one I found made you manually set each cut point, each time you split a file (there was no x minute interval feature).

So again, thanks!

daphy

16th November 2005, 07:50

Would a ( Would a (nother) MP3 splitter be a tool you use?nother) MP3 splitter be a tool you use?
:rolleyes:
sure:
CUE Splitter by enfis (http://www.enfis.it/transfer.php?id=41&type=binary) and/or mp3DirectCut by Martin Pesch (http://mpesch3.de1.cc/#mp3dc) for example

@communist:
daphy missed my points as well as slogra.
My tool is primarily used for temporary splitting of MP3 for mobilie listening. Lossy splitting doesn´t count for me if I don´t hear it.

Also two other thing weren´t answered:
Does mp3direct allow automatic cutting points lets say for every 5 minutes ? From my quick look at it I would say no.

Does mp3direct allow mass batch processing (e.g splitting 40 files into 5 min chunks with only a few mouse clicks) ? My guess would be no.

Also most lossless MP3 cutter fail when I try to split a few older, very rare audioplays recorded from the radio I got from someone. They are encoded at a very low bitrate.

...but well: It was just a question. I´m not in the mood to advertise stuff. As often:
* Done it for me
* Ask if someone would like it
* If not: Keep it.
-> Less users means less problems in terms of bug hunting, writting documentation , etc.

Have a good weekend,
D$:p
you asked, I answered - that´s it - don´t be offended :o

lonewolf32

16th November 2005, 19:39

Hmmm, after all that praise, I'm getting a bunch of stream errors when I run BeCutter on this one file (in the BeSplit DOS window - see image attachment) plus all the resulting files are widely varying sizes.

BeCutter was successful on several files before this one.

The MP3 file is the Chatterbox Game Show Podcast from 11/13/05 (http://www.chatterboxgameshow.com) .

Darksoul71

16th November 2005, 20:22

Hm, BeCutter is only a dump frontend for Besplit. So if Besplit fails to split the MP3, there is nothing BeCutter can do.

Sry,
D$

lonewolf32

16th November 2005, 20:27

I didn't intend to slam BeCutter, I hope it didn't come off that way. I was more hoping that I was doing something incorrect, that there was a setting I needed to fix somewhere. Has anyone run into this kind of error before?

Darksoul71

16th November 2005, 22:15

Hi lonewolf,

I didn´t feel slamed :D

Look, MP3 streams are available in the web in a variety of quality produced by a variety of encoders (some are good, some are bad). I´ve got a big collection of MP3s made by a friend of mine from old audioplays and audiobooks (at the time when it was still legal in Germany, but that´s another story). Many of those audiobooks were encoded using a rather crappy MP3 encoder (don´t ask !). BeSplit often fails for lossless cutting. Thus I developed my MP3 cutting script (which I called KutMP3).

@Daphy:
I´m not offended but the way you answered didn´t "sound" very nice.

-D$