Splitting audio files into smaller files

If you have a very large audio file, splitting it into smaller files of a fixed time duration can make it easier to deal with, especially if its some kind of audio book.

I use the following software on my Mac, although it should also work on linux distributions.

Download ffmpeg from https://evermeet.cx/ffmpeg/

If you are using a Mac, run the disk image and copy the resulting executable file to a folder of your choice. Lets assume you copied it to the /johndoe/audio_files directory.

Lets say your audio file is called source.mp3 and is in the /johndoe/audio_files directory as well. You can run the following command to split the file into 900 second chunks.

cd /johndoe/audio_files
mkdir split_files
./ffmpeg -i source.mp3 -f segment -segment_time 900 -c copy split_files/output%09d.mp3

Ryan Sukale


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