Saturday, November 13, 2004

listening to podcasts on a less than optimal mp3 player

Today some of the kids have a 5 hour fencing competition and I wanted to get caught up listening to some podcasts. The problem is the cheap little RCA Lyra 1080B has a couple problems with listening to long mp3s. When you pause playback for more than a few minutes, the device turns off, but on restart it resets to the beginning of the mp3. Also there is no way forward ahead within an mp3.

So looked around google for a way to split mp3s into smaller chunks and found
mp3splt.

This is how I load up the mp3 player with podcasts now:

Copy those 'casts I want to a tmp directory and then:

mp3splt -f -a -t 5.0 *.mp3

Which splits all the mp3s in the current directory into 5 minute chunks.

Then copy those chunks to the player mounted on /mnt:


find . -name "*00.mp3" -printf 'cp -v "%p" /mnt n' | sh


Off to the competition!

[update: Griffin got 3rd and Trevor 6th in novice Epee 12 and under while
Spencer came in 4th for 13 and older]