Preparing an audiobook for listening on an mp3 player

I recently ripped a 7-CD audiobook to listen to on my Sansa Clip+ MP3 player. After a bit of fiddling around with bash I was able to end up with a collection of 183 chapters named 1_01.mp3 through to 7_26.mp3 (the first bit was the disc number, then the track number.)

Simply copying these onto my player didn't work as the tracks were all out of sequence. In the past, with smaller books, I've simply skipped around between the sections to listen in order, but that wasn't going to be an option here.

After some experimenting I discovered the Sansa orders the tracks by the Track Number in the ID3 tag, so I fired off the following bash command to set up the ID3 details appropriately:

n=0 ;
for f in *.mp3 ;
do n=$((n+1)) ;
id3tag --artist="author name" --album="book name" --song="${f/.mp3/}" --track=$n $f ;
done

This numbers all the tracks from 1 to 183 in order and also sets the artist and album so I can find it easily in the Audiobook list. The .mp3 is stripped from the displayed filename too.

The id3tag program came from the libid3-3.8.3-dev package, not sure why/when I installed that one...

Podcast and Audiobook Queue Visualisation

Some screenshots of a little web app I created to visualise my podcast and audio book listening queue:

This shows files currently on my mp3 player. The width of each file represents it's size, the "window width" being 128mb.

Files that will be copied during the next "sync" are indicated with a red dot. Files are copied according to priority, to fill the player and to have only 3 audio book chapters at any time on the player unless there is nothing else to listen to.

Audio book chapters that have been copied/listened to already are highlighted, as are those that have been downloaded but not yet queued.

The displayed title is taken from the id3 tags if possible, otherwise the filename is used. Dates and redundant "book titles" are removed from the title if possible to maximise the amount displayed, and there is a "hover panel" to display other details.

There's also a pretty calendar to provide a gauge of the age of podcasts in different categories.