AlbumWrap program (merge individual audio files into one)?

[webfork]

Years ago there were a class of albums that were all distributed entirely in one file, marked as "AlbumWrap" files. I found out after some digging that this format was created by an old shareware program. Their website is available on archive.org where the download is posted, but I can't speak to whether or not it's abandonware or crippled due to the fact that you can't actually buy a license anymore. Plus the program is badly out of date and likely doesn't have the best compression/quality options.


Why would you want an AlbumWrap file?

They were ideal for a few reasons:

• Between songs blip - There would either be outright silence or a slight noise artifact between tracks that was of course never present on the CD. This is still an issue in some players.
• Tracks were added afterward - some music was meant to be heard in in full album format. Whether this was a holdover from LPs or as expectations by the music industry, sometimes the tracks are a distraction.
• Some iffy music players - Some music players saved all music to a single folder so if you had two tracks starting with 01-songname, play would overlap albums. I've used a music player as recently as a few months ago that just couldn't figure out how to play tracks successively.
• Early file sharing issues Not really an issue anymore, but some services would distribute some songs and not others and file reliability was low. The AlbumWrap files were generally the real deal.

Anyway, all this amounts to a question I've been low-key trying to solve for a long time now. Thought maybe it deserved it's own thread.


Possible solutions

The topic hasn't been at the top of my list to solve, but it came back when I found a program that that came close

• Of course there's an FFMPEG option for this, but I haven't tested it to see how it handles the transition noise.

• Helium Audio Joiner will merge audio. Unfortunately it looks like the process will recompress the audio. That's a problem because generally means reduced quality, sometimes very noticably. The same group also offers a splitter program that works to split up files via a number of tricks, but also seems to involve recompression.
  
  Note that the above links point to Softpedia links because these programs don't appear to be mentioned on the home page for the Helium freemium audio manager.

• MakeItOne: I found an ancient post from FWG that addresses reversible audio file merges, which is great. "Merge MP3s into a single file while maintaining the ability to revert back to the original files https://www.freewaregenius.com/makeiton ... nal-files/ - homepage: http://www.makeitone.net/audio/mp3albummaker.htm

Requesting...

Is there freeware to:

• create a single audio file from many
• without re-compression
• without audio artifacts between songs?

[lintalist]

No special software required

Code: Select all

copy /b *.mp3 merged.mp3

as described here https://www.ghacks.net/2008/11/18/join- ... mand-line/

Or if you have VLC and like GUIs you can use it too - I won't link it as the site is annoying (starts reading the text) but the first one I found describing the process "Method 2: VLC Media Player"
www . joyoshare . com / join-video / merge-mp3-files-windows-10.html
(also mentions cmd line option as ghacks)

[webfork]

No special software required

Code: Select all

copy /b *.mp3 merged.mp3

Unreal. I can't believe that works, but it does.

Or if you have VLC and like GUIs you can use it too

Cool, thanks.

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This topic also came up over on Reddit and there's a claim that MP3DirectCut can handle the task:

Looks like it works by selecting File - Batch Processing (pictured below):



It appears that you can modify the order in that window via drag-and-drop.