Audio chapter marks

[Quantum88]

hi

I have created an audio file which consists of several meditations, which my customers usually download to and listen to on their tablet or phone.

I'd like to include chapter marks in this file so that they could easily jump with one click to the meditation they want to listen to.  I guess, the idea is similar to an audio book, except that it doesn't have any visuals other than the cover. So those chapter marks would need to show on the playback progress line (somehoew).

Does the professional audio mastering program like Adobe Audition have this option? (I'd be surprised if it didn't)

thanks

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

If you are distributing as an MP3 file, then I'm afraid it doesn't - but that has nothing to do with Audition - it's an MP3 limitiation. Audition supports cues in Wav files, but even then they have to be added as a file extension (you don't get to see this, but it does mean that they can be edited in a separate program, and there is one available called CueListTool).

This is why audiobooks where you can do this use a different format, and have their own editors for marking up chapters. Typically this might be M4A or B, but there are others, like EPUB, etc. A good overview of what's available is here. Different organisations use different formats, and making a choice can sometimes be difficult as a result of this...

[Quantum88]

Auphonic now support chapters for MP3.

I am now checking exactly how this works on a tablet or phone for an audio other than podcast - but it looks like this is technically possible (?).

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

Even if it's possible, it still leaves you with meditiations that not everybody will be able to control; you still need a player that supports this. If you want to know more about this, the Wiki entry on ID3 has more information if you scroll down to the 3.2 part. In broad terms, it appears that the tags are added the same way that wav file markers are added, only at the start of the file, not the end. Audition presently does not support this implementation, and there is no indication about what might happen in the future. They did add support for album art pictures though, and having an implementation of chapter markers at least would certainly please a lot of people... (including me!)