Chapterize 1.0 review

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What I do is record radio programs with Audio Hijack Pro (Car Talk, Wait Wait, etc.

License: Freeware
OS: Mac OS X
File size: 2K
Developer: Chris Baier
Price: $0.00
Updated: 05 Jan 2006
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What I do is record radio programs with Audio Hijack Pro (Car Talk, Wait Wait, etc.) and write them to CD so I can listen to them in my car (since I am not always home when those programs are on).

Now, rather than have one hour-long CD track, I would open them in Sound Studio, break them up into 3 sessions (divided at their 17-minute breaks), save them as separate AIFF files and record them to CD with Toast. This took a lot of manual work.

However, I recently discovered—after downloading an audio book and writing it to CD—that iTunes would break the book into separate tracks by chapter when burning to CD (I’m using iTunes 5).

So I discoverd Apple’s ChapterTool. This will allow a person to make chapters in my M4A files (the format I use to record the radio shows with Audio Hijack Pro).

And I also discovered the “Join Together” script, which I used to figure out how to send a command to the Terminal to run ChapterTool. (I am lost when it comes to the Terminal. I can change directories, but that’s about it.)

So what I did was create an XML file (which ChapterTool uses to get the info on where to put the chapters in the audio file). Because I don’t know where the breaks in the program will be — some NPR programs break at the 17-minute mark, others vary sightly—I decided just to break them up into 10-minute increments. This allowed me to use a standard XML file for every program.

I then created the script ‘Chapterize’ (some sections leveraged from the Join Together script).
Chapterize is a small AppleScript that adds chapters to M4A(AAC) files.

The script runs from within Audio Hijack Pro, but you could change it so it runs when you drop a file on it.
The ChapterTool folder and the XML file are both in the Music folder (that’s where the script looks for them - you will have to change it so your XML file has the same name as what is in the script).
It saves a new, chapterized copy of the Audio file with “_CHP” added at the end, in the same folder as the original.
Since each Audio file may take a minute or two to process, I added the ‘say’ commands so I could get an audio update of what is going on.
It also beeps 3 times and opens the destination folder when it is done.

I just ran this on 20 files and it worked great. I then imported one into iTunes and burned it and it worked - there were 6 files on the CD. One thing I need to remember though, is to set the Gap Between Songs in iTunes burning preferences to ‘None’ since the gap may end up in the middle of a word or sentence—I don’t want a 2-second gap in between the tracks.

Requirements:
ChapterTool.

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