(I’m cross-posting this from my Last.fm journal.)
There ought to be a way to split single mp3 files into multiple tracks without splitting the files.
Apparently, there already exists a ‘chapters’ addendum to ID3v2, and I was even able to find one free app to edit said chapters, but it failed to run. And even if it had worked, I gather from its Readme that chapters aren’t supported by players, so it would be of no use.
The reason I’d love to be able to split mp3’s without touching the audio data is that I have some DJ sets in large mp3 files. As it is, they get logged into Last.fm’s database as ‘DJ Name: Set Name, part 1’, ‘DJ Name: Set Name, part 2’ and so on, when in reality they’re of course made up of individual tracks by various artists.
Now, I know it’s possible to split the tracks without re-encoding and thus retain the original quality. But the reason why I wouldn’t want to split these files into multiple mp3s is that they’re better for my portable player (an iRiver T10) in their current, large format. That’s because the player doesn’t know how to play tracks in succession without gaps in between them. And gaps between tracks in a continuous set don’t sound too good.
Apparently it can’t be achieved through tags currently. I have yet to check whether it’s possible to somehow store the individual tracks’ data into the playlist.