I’ve created a new project called mrmp3 that encodes MP3 chapters. The repository is here: https://github.com/rich1126/mrmp3.
This project has been a long time coming. I’ve been trying to add chapters to OHAC for months, and have found no (free) tools that do so on Linux. (There’s an excellent one for macOS called Forecast, however.) I knew there was some way to add these chapters using ffmpeg, and finally managed to find a resource that explained how to build up the command necessary to add chapter markers.
The simple thing to do was create a Python script that ran this for me. More importantly, I wanted a way to get the chapter information into the format required by ffmpeg. To do so, I wrote another set of scripts that take the way I normally format chapters for myself to share with Jack and Mikhail, and turns it into the ffmpeg metadata file.
Once I had those backbones, I decided this was the perfect time to mess around with making a GUI. I used a wonderful tool called PySimpleGUI to get the job done. It’s not super pretty, but it’s entirely functional and portable (which is good both for moving it between systems on my end, and so that it’s useful for any other Linux users, who do podcasts, and want chapters. There are certainly dozens of us.)
This was good practice in writing readable code, using GitHub, and leaves room for more work. In particular, having some sort of settings file that can be adjusted to define a default folder to open up, instead of the /home that I decided on. I could also work on trying to package this up in a way that makes it easy to distribute, although that requires learning setuptools in Python, and probably snap.
No matter what I do with it in the future, I’m happy that I made it. It’s finally something I can get off my back.