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Its frustrating when you spend an hour looking for a software application to do something for you. Even more so when there's a way for the operating system to do it for you in the first place!
Dated: Saturday, March 22, 2008.

Lets start off here by outlining the situation. A, leads to B, etc.

• I had a ripped audiobook on 6 disks. But due to an error on my own part, I ended up with between 10 and 30 tracks as individual files per disk, rather than 1.
• I prefer my audio books in disk or chaptered chunks, rather than as tracks.
• So something had to be done.

  You'd have thought it'd be a simple matter to join a bunch of files together into a single, larger file wouldn't you? And guess what? It is! But I didn't know that at the time did I? That's what I get for not using the command line very often.

  So I tried several programs, some of which worked better than others but all of which annoyed me for one reason or another. then I find The How-to Geek's article about merging log files together and it sparks something in my cranium...

  I won't repeat the article itself, but will make a few points.

  • The command given is

    for %f in (*.log) do type "%f" >> aggregate.txt

  • This works fine for logs but if you're tempted to modify the extensions to mp3, be warned that the loop will do all the mp3 files in your folder, as well as the new one you've just created. In effect, you get double what you wanted.
  • The way I got around this was simple. Originally all of my wripped files were in one folder. So I used MP3Tag to separate out the files into folders, based on their disk. This was easy as both album and track ID3 tags had been filled in so I simply clicked "convert", "tag -- filename" and typed "%album%\%track%". In about 0.2 seconds, the job was done and I had 6 folders with a varying number of files in them.
  • This does mean 6 concatenation commands, but I was producing 6 files anyway so that's not a problem.I also wanted to make sure that my output files weren't in a folder belonging to a disk. I Dos to the first disk and my command goes:

    for %f in (*.mp3) do type "%f" >> ../01.mp3

  • I then want to go to the next disk so I "cd ../2", and repeat the command above, substituting "01" for "02".
  • Rinse and repeat... For all 6 folders.

  There are readers of these little posts who will laugh at my sheer stupidity for not thinking of this sooner. There are also readers who would even find the typing of 12 commands in a prompt too much to accomplish this simple task. Of course they have evry right - I could have written a quick batch file to loop through the folders in the same way the type command loops through the files. This is, however, one of those stupid tasks that you only ever seem to think about when you need and that only ever seems to come up so infrequently as to make it not worth going out of your way for.

  Anyway: rant over. I simply wished to give you a laugh, some insight, or confusion as to what the hell I'm talking about.

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