How do I merge tracks from audiobooks so they are one file instead of 100 separate tracks?

Some of my audiobooks download as 1 7-hour long track. Others are in iTunes as 50-100 separate tracks (that sometime get out of order). I would like to merge the tracks so each audiobook appears as one long file/track. How do I do this?

I do this in the terminal with ffmpeg.

1. Install ffmpeg. Download it from https://evermeet.cx/ffmpeg/, extract the 7z archive, and copy ffmpeg to /usr/local/bin. Alternately, if you use Homebrew or MacPorts, you can brew install ffmpeg or sudo port install ffmpeg, respectively.
2. cd into a directory containing all the audiobook segments you want to join together. Make sure the file path does not contain any spaces.
3. Run: ffmpeg -safe 0 -f concat -i <(for f in $PWD/*.EXT; do echo "file '$f'"; done) -codec copy full.EXT, replacing both instances of "EXT" with the file extension used by your audiobook (mp3, m4a, etc).

This will, of course, not work with DRM'd audiobooks. The same will be true for any tool that does not strip the DRM.

I use the software Audiobook Builder to merge single tracks from an audiobook to one file. Afterwards you can delete the originals if you want. You can find the programm in the Mac App Store.

You can use online tools. There are several websites like Audio Joiner:

1. Choose files to upload. Select which audio files you want to merge.

2. Choose the settings for your output file. After selecting the appropriate audios for merging, drag-and-drop them until they are in the desired order.

3. Download a single big file.

I belive this is the most convenient method whithout installing anything nor typing several instructions. It will accept different extensions like wav, ogg, wma, m4a, but depending on your files you will have to convert to MP3 prior to uploading. You can do this on iTunes.

I created a free tool (Track Concatenator) to join together iTunes tracks. It uses ffmpeg and mp4v2 to merge files and it adds chapter markers so you can easily skip between the original tracks in the merged file.

More information: https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/trackconcat