I have a fairly vast collection of mixed albums that I listen to on my iPod Classic. I was planning on RockBoxing the thing, but since it's a Classic I'm pretty much out of luck there, so I've been converting my Flac to AAC (using a modified version of lossless2lossy.sh that also embeds cover art in the files) and generally, that's been an almost acceptable solution (I prefer to put my albums in directories of my own choosing...but that's beside the point.) It's mostly gapless, but occasionally I get a dropout between tracks that I blame on vibration of the HD or something like that. It never skips in-song, only between.

A few days ago, I happened upon a Release Yourself podcast by Roger Sanchez...and the wonderful world of enhanced podcasts was opened up to me. NAMED chapter breaks? Skipping between chapters? Sign me UP! This would fix my gapless issues as well as making the library of music nice and tidy.

That is until I started trying to figure out how to do it. The Chapter Tool released by Apple is apparently gone (page is gone at least), and the tool is only available from some alternative download sites. It continues to be a Mac-only tool, and there is only one alternative that I've found, Slide Show Maker or something like that for Windows, but it's non-trivial to use I need some serious command-line functionality for this thing to work the way I want it to.

What I'm trying to do is take my separate-file Flac and encode to a single AAC file with named chapter breaks where the track boundaries are. I'd like to do this automatically...given a directory tree of Flac files (artist/album or some such organization) it would run on the whole thing, and create a single file for each album, properly tagged.

Since this tool doesn't exist, I'm happy to write it - but can someone point me to some information about how the tags for chapters work? I'm coming up empty, and I don't know if there's any additional interest in this, or if I'm a dinosaur listening to full albums instead of individual tracks.

C

If you are able to run win32 apps under Wine, you could effectively use MP4Creator (QTF Build 1.0) to add chapters to any *.m4a (or *.m4v, or *.m4b...) file.

I've been doing the same thing - on a Vista system, but using the same tools - since this was released, in October '07.

- M.

If you only need chapters markers (no matter if Nero or Quicktime) but no chapter images then head over to mp4v2 and check out the utils that accompany the library (especially mp4chaps).

Yes, I'm not super interested in having different images for each chapter, really that's icing. Really what I have to do is:

a. convert the separate flacs into a single AAC file (which I know that Nero's command-line encoder can do if I specify all of the flac filenames, but I don't know if the chapter marks that it puts in there will cause problems with the mp4 ones)

b. tag the new full-album aac file with artist/album (but not track)

c. use mp4chaps to add chapter markers to the aggregate aac file

This make sense?

<edit> BRILLIANT! Thx for the link, Ullrich! Works fantastically. A little Python to tie it all together and make it automated, and I'll be all set.</edit>

UPollaehne -

I managed to get a script going with mp4chaps, and I added chapter markers and text to a .m4a file. Using mp4chaps -l results in:



...so it appears to have worked properly. I opened the file in iTunes on my windows xp machine, and the chapter names appear alternately when playing the track, so that's fine...but on the iPod itself, the text doesn't appear. The chapter markers do, in the right places, but the text doesn't change during playback. Note that I am not setting the 'title' tag on the m4a file using neroAacTag, since I figure the chapter titles should override it, no? Am I doing something wrong?

ARGH! FOILED YET AGAIN BY APPLE!

Apparently they don't WANT to let you have a single track MUSIC file with text info at the chapter marks, it has to be either tagged an Audiobook or a Podcast for the text to show up...at least that's what I've found so far. I changed the type of the file to Audiobook and it shows up just fine...but then all of my albums will be listed under Audiobooks - and there's hundreds of them.

GRR. If ONLY I'd gotten a 5.5G.

Yeah, it's a bit annoying.
On my iPod Touch I get the chapters for music also.