Trying to find a software mp3 player with a certain feature...

December 23, 2017 12:32 PM

Anybody know a software mp3 player that can be set to skip to the next song after a certain amount of seconds?

Yes, it only plays the beginnings. And the amount of seconds is adjustable. Otherwise it'd have the usual features of a media player like Winamp.

I've tried Foobar, Winamp, Windows media player, Jet Audio, and VLC player...though I might have missed something. I'd rather not install a bunch of octopussy softwares on my computer, just to try them out.

It'd save me a LOT of work with some music exercises.

posted by Rich Smorgasbord to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

You can do it with a playlist & VLC I believe. Something like

#EXTVLCOPT:start-time=0
#EXTVLCOPT:stop-time=30
file1.mp3
#EXTVLCOPT:start-time=0
#EXTVLCOPT:stop-time=30
file2.mp3
#EXTVLCOPT:start-time=0
#EXTVLCOPT:stop-time=30
file2.mp3
...

if the internet is to be believed. (The above should be in a .m3u file, in case that wasn’t clear.)
posted by pharm at 1:52 PM on December 23, 2017

I can't think of a piece of software that does that, but maybe thinking a little creatively, you can set a script to press the button that would be "next" every X seconds using something like AutoHotKey?
posted by General Malaise at 1:53 PM on December 23, 2017

Why not just create 30 second snippet versions of your mp3 files (or w/e format) and play those using a regular player?

ffmpeg would be the tool I'd choose for the purpose of chopping them up -- it's a powerful media processing tool and handles a wide array of codecs from aac to mp3 and on and on. Something like:

ffmpeg -t 30 -i inputsong.mp3 -acodec copy outputsong.mp3

...for a single file's first 30 seconds. Just generate a batch script to do a whole pile if you need to; google a tutorial to learn how to do that since it's a bit outside the scope of this question.
posted by axiom at 6:11 PM on December 23, 2017

foo_skip can do what you request with the severe downside of having to modify the files' metadata everytime you wish to toggle skipping on/off.

For example, to skip a track after 10 seconds add a SKIP tag with value 0:00:10- to all the relevant files. They will now always skip unless you remove the tag or the foo_skip component.
posted by Bangaioh at 6:36 PM on December 23, 2017

Musicbee, my chosen Winamp replacement, has a configurable Track Previewer plugin that will do what you want.
posted by quinndexter at 8:18 PM on December 23, 2017 [2 favorites]

I have done this in iTunes where in the specific song options I can choose “start from” and “end at”. I have done this to skip some long intros and the behaviour persisted when i transferred the song to my phone.
posted by alchemist at 11:37 PM on December 23, 2017

quinndexter's answer, aside from being a solution in its own right, gave me the idea to search for "preview" and got me foo_seek, which seems to do exactly what you want with no hoops to jump through.
posted by Bangaioh at 1:56 AM on December 24, 2017

Another way would be to write a small bit of vbscript which plays only the first 30 seconds. The big advantage of this would be that it doesn't need any additional software to be installed.

Let me know if this is something you're interested in.
posted by mr_silver at 9:23 AM on December 24, 2017

Response by poster: Axiom: I've done plenty of that. I end up with hundreds of files I have to herd around and keep track of. Later on I have to do shorter versions, then shorter, more mp3s... I'd like to simplify things.

I've solved the problem for now by just assigning the spacebar to move to the next file in the playlist. I'd like to eventually do it hands-free though.

I haven't tried Musicbee or fooseek yet, but they sound good, so I'll mark the question as answered.
posted by Rich Smorgasbord at 11:43 AM on December 24, 2017