The DF Lab

So I had a bit of difficulty with this one, and a difficulty that I really only got because I chose to test my files with mplayer. I essentially tried to use the widely suggested method of using cat to combine mp3 files like so:

$ cat a.mp3 b.mp3 c.mp3 > d.mp3

Believe it or not, it works. Apparently the mp3 file format is such that you can do this. However, if you have id3 tags on any of the files, this will cause some issues for playback with finicky audio players like mplayer. While some players (ffplay for example) will ignore such garbage it finds in files, mplayer won’t do it so gracefully. In order to fix this, you have to strip all id3 tags from the files first. After a bit of searching, I found a nice utility which can do just that, aptly named id3v2. All you have to do is use it like so:

$ id3v2 -D a.mp3

And voila! id3 v1 and v2 tags are removed from the file. Simple and easy.

You can pick id3v2 up on sourceforge, but if you’re using Gentoo, there’s an ebuild in the portage tree.

linux cli, music