Interlude: Audio Book Cutter Portable or "Maybe this will get me to finally listen to my pastor's sermons"

Sorry for the long time between posts. Rather than getting into the next part of the portable browser wars I thought it would be nice to do a couple of short reviews on some really neat programs I've been using lately and get back to the longer articles when I have the time.

First off is the beta test of Audio Book Cutter Portable which you can find here. With this program you can take your longer Audio Book or podcast files and split them up into shorter files, all without re-encoding the MP3's. This makes it much easier to find your place, especially on an MP3 player or when burned to a CD, and makes the splitting process very fast, under a minute for files about an hour long at 64kbps.

The installation is simple, download and run the EXE. Once installed splitting files is easy:

To Split an MP3:

• Select the file
• Choose a prefix and average length (I recommend 3 minutes)
  
• Choose an output location and go

In order to split the file Audio Book Cutter uses silence detection to make clean breaks in the file. For speech and music with clear breaks this method works well, but for trance or dance mixes where the sound is basically uninterrupted, the cuts tend to be much larger than the desired average.

Also, while track information is stored in the file, there is no option for setting the album title, which registers as unknown on most players. This means that any other files with unknown albums will also be played with the audio book files if the user wants to play by album. It is relatively simple in Windows, however, to set this album value.

The default prefix is track which works well when outputting the files to a new folder. However, the user should be careful if they want multiple books in the same folder to rename the prefixes accordingly otherwise the already created files will be overwritten.

All in all a useful application for those who want to find their place in podcasts on their MP3 player, and coming in at about 2.5 Megs, this program is a must have for portable app audiophiles.

EDIT: One thing I forgot to mention. When playing the files back on an MP3 player there is a slight (less than a second) pause whenever track transitions occur. This may be primarily because of the player and not the program. It is not enough to disrupt the listening experience.