mpgtx: Slicing and dicing, mpegs of all varieties

Having already cruised past such heavyweights as mplayer, mencoder, handbrake, avidemux, inkscape and imagemagick makes me a little more comfortable approaching mpgtx.

A tool specifically for carving away at mpeg files of all varieties is not intimidating in itself.

Knowing full well that it’s a console-only tool, with nothing graphical aside from specific control characters … that might be daunting to some.

mpgtx wisely subordinates some obvious functions to quick mnemonics, taking its biggest functions and relegating them to ancillary “programs.” So mpgtx -s is the same is mpgsplit, and so forth.

I mention that only because I enjoy little conveniences like those.

Once you get used to how mpgtx represents ranges and times, it becomes a piece of cake to get it to split or join as you like.

Knowing some of the mechanics of a video file are important too though. I had a lot of false starts with split video files until I used the -P flag, to preserve the metadata between the original and the chunk output.

Of course, it’s not quite correct, but it helps get playback started.

mpgtx claims it can handle mp3 files too, and tagmp3 — supposedly the same as mpgtx -T — has a lot of the same functions as in mp3rename and similar tools.

So what you get with mpgtx is a wide variety of tools that approach a wide variety of media files. Not a bad tool to have around. 😐

One final note: I feel somehow obligated to mention that the last posted update to mpgtx was in 2005.

Ordinarily I don’t mind if a program is out of date, even if it stretches back to the late 1980s.

Part of me wonders how well this is keeping up with newer file types and media standards, and if that would be an issue with more recently encoded files.

Take care and keep backups, would be my advice. Not to be a scaremonger, just that prudence is the better part of valor.

mp3wrap: What has been rent asunder shall be forged anew

Mentioning mp3splt before mp3wrap was putting things out of order, in a manner of speaking.

After all, mp3wrap bundles a series of mp3 files as a single, playable, continuous mp3 file, while retaining all the tag data. Magical.

And of course, mp3splt reverses that action, like we talked about earlier today.

mp3wrap handles itself nicely, keeps flags to a minimum, gives you plenty of information while it’s working, and keeps the concatenated file around the same size as a compressed file of the same info.

I’m not sure why a wrapped mp3 file would be preferable to split singles, but that shouldn’t perplex me. To each his own.

But what will keep me awake tonight is the question … could I wrap several wrapped files, and retain the individual file information? Can I wrap every song in my collection? Is there a mega-mp3wrap solution to all my music backup needs?

The mind boggles. 😯