
Show HN: M4b-tool – a tool to merge, split and chapterize audiobooks - sandreas
https://github.com/sandreas/m4b-tool
======
aasasd
I'm curious: what players do people use so that they feel the need to _merge_
an audiobook into a single file? With VLC, the accuracy of my aim on the time
bar would become nonexistent. Just two days ago I've finally whipped up a
script to _split_ books, and not by chapters but into 10-minute chunks.

~~~
dewey
I use Apple Books and it works well with chapters so I usually create the
books with
[https://www.splasm.com/audiobookbuilder/](https://www.splasm.com/audiobookbuilder/)

~~~
sandreas
Audiobookbuilder is nice, but commercial and only available on MacOS...
Another open source alternative is Audiobook Binder
([http://bluezbox.com/audiobookbinder.html](http://bluezbox.com/audiobookbinder.html))
- which is good and also comes with a command line utility, but it hat some
GUI issues and is only available for MacOS.

Another german project for Windows is
[http://www.audiobookcreator.de/](http://www.audiobookcreator.de/), which
works, but it also did not fit my needs - i prefer auto command line merge
instead of manual GUI interaction

------
schemathings
Another poster cited "a cover per chapter, etc" as an advantage, but I don't
see that capability in the linked tool (and I don't think it's part of the m4b
format, which is a shame - the ability to change art per chapter or even more
so, at points in the timeline, would really open some new uses e.g. saved
lectures with slides).

~~~
sandreas
There already is an issue for this on m4b-tool:
[https://github.com/sandreas/m4b-tool/issues/21](https://github.com/sandreas/m4b-tool/issues/21)

In this issue there is a detailed description, how this can be achieved, but i
did not manage to get it working with cover and audio (help wanted)

------
crowbahr
Very cool. This should integrate well into my ongoing audiobook hacking work.
Building my own personalized shell scripts to interact with my library is fun!

~~~
sandreas
Glad you like it. The batch mode together with the docker image and the --jobs
parameter was a huge improvement to convert a bunch of audiobooks, even if
there is much room for more.

------
em-bee
this looks useful. i wonder how accurate it can detect chapters. i have been
doing this work manually with audacity. and while the silence detector got me
quite far, there always was some manual post processing to do because
sometimes there were long silences within chapters or the chapter break was
shorter than the others...

~~~
sandreas
Chapter detection is one thing that I'm working on. The speech detection thing
is promising, there is a log of work to do for this. Especially non-english
languages are difficult.

I'm also working on a online platform in my free time to share manually
crafted chapter sets via api (like freedb), but I'm not sure that it will ever
go online :-) I won't give it up either...

~~~
schemathings
I have sort of an opposite wish for the chapter detection feature. I'm a big
fan of podcasts that tell a story per season or whatever you want to call it.
Lot's of them have an intro ad for an indeterminate period of time and signal
the beginning of the episode with an intro blurb usually voice over of
'welcome to ..' with some background music. I really don't mind listening to
the ads the first time through but would love to save whole seasons without
the leader ads as an M4b file - I've thought about writing this in the past,
just haven't gotten to it. The ability to detect those points in a series of
mp3s and bundle them up into an m4b would be super useful in my book.

~~~
sandreas
Nice idea... perhaps i will try to build this feature more generic and instead
of only a chapter detection feature i will add a plugin interface, so that
hooks could be defined for merge, split or chapter... But this is far far in
the future ;)

