Concatenating a bunch of WAV files

October 5, 2008 12:01 PM

Is there an easy way to concatenate WAV files in batch mode?

I record various speaking programs on a shared mixer board, and sometimes the settings get changed. I recently recorded one to CD-R and the recorder started a new track every time there was silence. The result is 99 WAV files, all sequentially titled "Unknown artist...01, Unknown artist...02" and so on. I've found several freeware programs that will allow me to concatenate WAV files, but I have to individually pick each one from the list and "add" it to the queue. That wouldn't be a huge problem, but this isn't the first time this has happened and I'm just wondering if there is an easier solution. I'd love to be able to Shift-select a bunch of files at once, or use Unknown*.* or some other method to quickly chain the files back together into one long WAV file.

Seems a fairly simple problem, but I haven't been able to find the solution...

posted by JParker to technology (5 comments total)

Open the directory in foobar2000 ("Enqueue in foobar2000" on your Explorer right-click context menu), select all tracks from the playlist, right-click "Convert to...", select WAV, and select the output directory.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 12:39 PM on October 5, 2008

foobar2000 will do this. Drag your files into the queue window, highlight the files you want to concatenate (or select all the usual way, Ctrl-A), right-click and select "Convert > Convert to Single File." Ta-da.
posted by mykescipark at 12:40 PM on October 5, 2008

You need sox! It's command line only but that's ok:

cd somefolder
sox *.wav out.wav

Of course that might not put them in the right order - luckily it reads .pls or .m3u files so just load them up in your favourite player software, save the playlist then do

sox myplaylist.pls out.wav

On preview, probably easier to stick with foobar2000 as the simuposts above suggest.
posted by samj at 12:50 PM on October 5, 2008

Adobe Audition will do this - if you're importing audio from a CD, you can choose to import based on overall time, rather than by track. If you choose to import the entire disc, you get one wav that covers the whole span. I imagine there's other programs that are similar.
posted by god hates math at 3:41 PM on October 5, 2008

Thanks! foobar2000 was exactly what I needed.
posted by JParker at 8:19 AM on October 6, 2008