Can I add my own audio to MP3s, specifically prepend the track number?

2011-10-27 17:40:43

Hello all first time poster here.

I dont know if anyone can help but here goes, my grandfather is partially sighted and used to love reading novels but cant any longer due to his deteriorating eyesight.
Now i have bought him an mp3 player without a display just big buttons and have downloaded some audio books, is there anyway that i can edit the individual tracks so that they announce the track number just before they start playing so if he loses track he will be able to find the part he is on again easily.

Thanks for any help

Can I add my own audio to MP3s, specifically prepend the track number?

Reply #1 – 2011-10-27 18:30:37

Yes.  Any audio editor can do that.  "Cutting and splicing" is are about the most basic audio editing functions. (You probably won't see the word "splice"...  You'll typically see "Insert" or "Paste".)

An audio editor can also be used for recording.

Some popular audio editors:
Audacity (FREE!!! -  Very popular!)
Wavoasur (FREE!!!)
GoldWave ($59 USD with free lifetime upgrades - I'm a longtime GoldWave user)
Adobe Audition $350 USD)


And, there are a few special-purpose MP3 editors:
mp3DirectCut (FREE!!!)
MP3 Surgeon ($30 USD)

The special-purpose MP3 editors can't do as much as a general-purpose audio editor, but they have the advantage of not having to decode & re-encode the MP3 (which presereves the quality which isn't a big problem with spoken voice.)  They also work faster, since you don't have to wait for encoding/decoding and you're working directly on the smaller (compressed) files.  And since they have fewer features, they might be easier to use.  But, you'll probably have to use something else for recording.

With some audio editors (i.e. Audacity) you have to download the (usually free*) LAME MP3 encoder separately (for licensing reasons).    It's an extra step, but the instructions are usually clear because just about every user needs the ability to save in MP3 format.



* When you distribute an MP3 encoder, you're supposed to pay a royality.  So the people who develope & distrubute free (or cheap) audio editors often don't include it with their software.

Can I add my own audio to MP3s, specifically prepend the track number?

Reply #2 – 2011-10-27 18:50:39

Thanks very much Im going to try and create the audio via the voice recorder on my phone then attempt to merge with the mp3's using audacity

Can I add my own audio to MP3s, specifically prepend the track number?

Reply #3 – 2011-10-27 21:17:43

If you had a lot of files and/or just wanted to, you could automate the joining of decoded audiobooks to pre-recorded intros for each track number using a command line audio processor such as SoX to join the WAV files in batch mode. Perhaps there’s an analogous way to directly concatenate the introductory and main MP3 files without decoding?

If you do decode to and re-encode from WAV, as DVDdoug said, you probably don’t need to worry too much about audible degradation in the case of vocal signals; still, it’s worth re-encoding to at least the same, if not a slightly higher, bitrate and then checking whether the audio sounds okay.

Also, LAME is always free, not just “usually free”… You can download compiled executables from several sites, the most frequently recommended and updated of which is RareWares.