A program for chopping up MP3 and ADTS AAC files.
mp3chop is a small command line program that can be used for extracting parts of MP3 and ADTS-format AAC files and reporting information about these files. It is designed to work as a filter program in the UNIX sense. As it processes the file it only outputs MP3/ADTS frames so it also removes junk from the file. It is capable of stripping or preserving ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags. Since it only works at the frame level it supports MPEG 1 & 2 layer 1 and layer 2 files in addition to the layer 3 files implied by its name.
You can learn more by reading the mp3chop man page.
Since mp3chop development started over twenty years ago, other tools have been developed that handle far more file formats and might be a better alternative. For example ffmpeg can be used to chop many different file types with commands like:
ffmpeg -loglevel warning -y -i input_file.mp3 -ss mm:ss -to mm:ss -c copy output_file.mp3
The current version uses Meson to build on multiple platforms. It is possible to cross-compile successfully for Windows from Linux, but I have not tried the resulting binaries.
Suppose you wanted to extract the section of a file between three and four minutes but keeping the ID3v1/v2 tags. Something like this would be good:
mp3chop --begin=3:00.00 --end=4:00.00 < input.mp3 > output.mp3
You've got a file that misbehaves on some player or other and you'd like to know more about it:
mp3chop --dump-all < input.mp3 | pager
To get full details of supported options use:
mp3chop --help
mp3chop is released under the terms of the GNU General Public license version 2 or later. See www.gnu.org for details. It is distributed only in source code form. You can view the latest Change Log.
Please drop me an email if you use mp3chop or to report bugs.
The mp3chop source code is now maintained using Git at GitLab.