A natty little utility for extracting bits of ADTS MP3 and AAC files. It does this by walking the frames of the file knowing how much audio they will generate and enables/disables output as appropriate depending on the timecode associated with the frame. It doesn't actually understand the contents of the frames. MP3 frames can contain references to other frames and often do. This means that mp3chop can generate output that contains references to frames that do not exist in the output. Because the MP3 is a streaming format decoders should deal with this correctly and glean what information they can from the frames before discarding them if they cannot produce audio from them. Some decoders may output a diagnostic such as "frame discarded" when this happens. AAC ADTS frames are always self contained so this problem does not occur.
Since I started developing mp3chop over twenty years ago, other tools have been developed that handle far more file formats and might be a better alternative. The one I now use is ffmpeg which can be used to chop arbitrary files with commands like:
ffmpeg -loglevel warning -y -i input_file.mp3 -ss mm:ss -to mm:ss -c copy output_file.mp3The existence of alternatives means that mp3chop isn't really developed any more.
mp3chop is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 or, at your option, later. See the COPYING file for a copy of this licence.
mp3chop uses the Meson build system. You should first install Meson, either from your Linux distribution using something like:
apt install meson
or PIP:
pip3 install --user meson
then run:
meson --buildtype=release build
ninja -C build
You can run the mp3chop tool from the build directory, or copy it elsewhere. Alternatively, to install the program and its manual page on your system run:
sudo ninja -C build install
More information about Meson can be found at https://mesonbuild.com/
Please send bug reports, patches and pull requests to:
- Mike Crowe [email protected]
Also see:
Mike Crowe, [email protected] 2022/05/08