A couple of days ago I was downloading MP3s (within all legal rights) of sermons from “Walk in the Word,” a radio Bible ministry out of a city in Illinois and thought, “You know, it’d be great to have these things split up into tracks on a CD.” Easy enough to burn a CD with the MP3 straight from the ‘net: you just crank up the burner and let ‘er rip, right? But wait–what if you don’t want to hear the sermon all the way through in one sitting, or what if Dr. McDonald makes some spectacular point and you’re taking notes so furiously that your hand is about to fall off (and you can’t keep up with him because (1) he elocutes so quickly and (2) you’re so used to being able to type so much more quickly and easily than you can hand-write) and you want to go back in the message to catch a part that made a low hum as it flew over your head? Well, sometimes these are the precise problems that afflict me.
SO! The simple solution? I figured I could just decode the MP3 to a WAV file and break that WAV file up with a nice little freeware utility I found called Audacity. Well, Audacity is a superlative piece of software, but in this case, it couldn’t help–neverminding the fact that it was 03:00 and I was tired and irritable anyway–because it didn’t have a way to split up the WAV file into many small WAV files of arbitrary length of seconds or minutes. So after an unfruitful thirty minute search on Google, I became so incensed persuaded that I should search for a simple MP3 splitter. Well, lo and behold! The Google query returned a few immediate hits with programs called just that! So, I clicked on the first few, and was soon disappointed to find out (after having downloaded at least one or two) that they were trial versions: shareware. Alas! The bane of every college computer geek: the sweet grapes of which you may sample but for a moment before the vine recedes into the upper branches of “$ Your Semi-Functional Program Has Expired $” Land. Oy. (I’ll save that rant for another day.) So after another thirty minutes of searching (it’s about 04:45 at this point, for those of you keeping track), I finally find the grail: a fully freeware MP3 Splitter with all the functions I need! So as you can imagine, when I clicked on a link–then another–then another–that purportedly pointed to the program that all gave me a friendly German “404 Not Found” error, I was fully prepared to chew nails. More Googling, this time in broken German (which would have been impossible not a week ago–I just started my elementary German class!–über), rendered one mirror on which this program was housed.
Whew!
I said all that to say this: the program worked fantastically, flawlessly, like the perfect Deutsche Maschine that it is, and I couldn’t be more pleased. There are sites in the US making a killing off of selling this very thing for $20+ per license. Since I pride myself on finding little nuggets of freeware like this one, I felt particularly rewarded from having found it, especially after a couple of hours’ pounding Google in the wee hours.
Bottom line: if you need to split an MP3 up into n number of equally-sized MP3s for whatever reason and don’t want to spend $20 on some ridiculous piece of fluffed-up adware, check out MP3Splitter 2.00.
- Readme file (English).
- Website on which the downloadable file was found (browse Multimedia -> MP3 Tools).
- And for those not utterly enthralled with wading through a Deutsch web page, a local mirror [310 KB].
