Additional Information
Now that we have the basic command down, there needs to be a few notes made here. This joining method is not perfect. I have found that if you leave the ID3 Tag information on the MP3 files you are joining, it tends to mess up playback on some MP3 players. Before you decide to combine the MP3's I would wipe all ID3 tag off of the MP3's. Then after the files are newly combined, add it back. Wiping the ID3 Tag data should prevent the playback from being messed up on some MP3 players. Now some extra commands that you can use. Say you have the situation I described in the Introduction of having a Book on MP3 that you copied for use on your MP3 Player which was ripped into a ton of MP3's. Not wanting to copy the massive amount of files (which takes much longer than transferring a few files) you would rather Join them by Chapter and copy the 30 or so MP3 Files instead.
Well first of all, make sure they display in the default sort chronological order. IE, MP31.mp3 MP32.mp3 etc. This will hopefully ensure that the MP3 files are joined in the proper order. Now that we have verified the MP3 files seem to be named properly and are in order the simple command to join a whole folder of MP3's is as follows:
1 | copy /B "folder/*.mp3" "output/BookTitle_Chapter1.mp3" |
Given that folder is the path to the folder of the .mp3 files and output is the folder where you want to put the combined / joined MP3 files. The *, for those who do not know, is a "Catch all" wild card. I used Quotes, which you would only need to use if the folder path has a space in it. Once that command runs, you should have a valid joined MP3, now you can go ahead and copy this MP3 to your MP3 Player and listen to the joined / combined MP3's without having to copy many files.
Ending Notes
Using the Copy command on Windows allows a user to combine / join an MP3 for free using basic commands provided to them. Although it is not as "robust" as some other MP3 joiners, it is free and the copy method does work. The other nice thing about this simple copy Command is that this can easily be integrated into a C++ / PHP / WScript etc. program to be used to create the "Chapters" or join multiple folders automatically. Myself setup a PHP script to traverse my Book MP3 file (the MP3's were separated into Directories) and combine them into Chapters. Hopefully the solution provided to Join / combine MP3s for free using Windows Copy Command works for you!
