Merge two mp3 php

Question

Do you know a class to merge two MP3 files using PHP?

I\'ve found nothing on Google.

Answer 1

If the .mp3 files are just MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Layer III audio, then the files can just be concatenated. There is no real concept of a header for the whole file. Each frame has a header followed by data, and the file is just comprised of a sequence of frames, which is called the bitstream. The bitrate, stereo mode, etc, do not necessarily have to be the same within a bitstream, so you can concatenate dissimilar files. The Wikipedia article explains this, but I think the spec actually is easier to understand.

ID3 tags, or an other data, within the file (which technically renders it a non-compliant bitstream) may muck things up on the decoder end.

The spec for MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 audio is actually pretty simple. Writing a parser to chunk a file into frames, and then interpreting the headers is not that much work. The last time I did this, it only took an hour or two.

The ID3 spec isn't that complicated either, so I suspect writing some code to strip out the tags before concatenation should be easy, but I have never done this.

The getID3() library (http://getid3.sourceforge.net/) may provide some guidance, too. It has been a while since I have used it, but it may also support opening MP3s and stripping out the ID3 tags already.

HTH