Make an album in .mka format

[Neillithan]

Well, I read that one of the benefits of .mka is its ability to mux several audio tracks together into one .mka file while retaining individual track times and all that good stuff.

Essentially what I'm looking for is a way to double click a .mka file and have it load in my favorite audio player while displaying all of the tracks with their times, names, individual information... but I don't know how to "make" an .mka file with all of that good stuff.

I realize that it's easier just to make a playlist, but in my case, I think it would be cooler just to have entire albums of music in a single track form.

I already tried using a program called mkvtoolnix, but it's a bit overwhelming for a beginner like me to figure out on my own.

Can somebody explain in simplistic terms how to make this work?

Thanks in advance
-Neil

[qyot27]

I've never attempted to do that, but I would presume the way would be to have the audio stream (in whatever format you choose) and a CUE file - some CD ripping programs will output the cuesheet with the track times, which is how that would be obtained. MKVMerge - the muxing program in mkvtoolnix - accepts cuesheets (under the Global tab in the GUI, the field for Chapters).

To get all that specialized info though (as opposed to just track times), you might need to edit the cuesheet in a text editor like Notepad or Wordpad. Alternately, you could use an XML-based chapters file, which MKVMerge's GUI has an area for composing/editing.


If the tracks are in separate files already, the Append function of MKVMerge would likely be what you'd need, but you'd probably still need the cuesheet to give it any of the information about the tracks (so having a preexisting audio file that contains them all is likely just simpler).