Does chapters command require an m4b?

[majant0]

Does the chapters feature require starting with an m4b file? I was trying to use m4b-tool to generate a chapter-ized m4b file starting with a long mp3. I used Audacity to find the chapter breaks and I inputted those into a chapters.txt file. I tried to run mp4-tool using the chapters command but it didn't generate an m4b file, just another mp3 file that was nearly double the size of the original.

[sandreas]

Does the chapters feature require starting with an m4b file?

Should not - but the chapters command is not as highly frequented as the merge command, so it is possible, that chapters has issues I do not know.

I tried to run mp4-tool using the chapters command but it didn't generate an m4b file, just another mp3 file that was nearly double the size of the original.

Could you provide the command you used? Maybe I can reproduce the problem on my system.

However, as an alternative to m4b-tool you could try to use my newer project tone for this task. It does not use any external tools and should work something like this:

• create a <myfilename>.chapters.txt with the chapters you want
• run tone tag --auto-import chapters <myfilename>.mp3

[majant0]

I first tried this: m4b-tool chapters --logfile=log.txt -v --max-chapter-length=1800,3600 "Chris Harman - A Peoples History of the World Audiobook.mp3"

When that didn't work, I tried getting rid of the max-chapters parameter: m4b-tool chapters --logfile=log.txt -v "Chris Harman - A Peoples History of the World Audiobook.mp3"

I will try tone next time. I already went ahead with splitting the file into multiple mp3's using audacity and have successfully created the m4b using the merge command. edit: I have an M1 Mac so tone won't work for me. I'll continue to monitor that project to see if that issues gets resolved.

[sandreas]

Sorry for not responding... I try to take a look at this as soon as possible.