Breaking podcasts into chunks for burning to CD

2023-04-20T17:57:23Z

Posted by: isaacschemm

Sometimes I want to listen to a podcast on a TV, and sometimes the easiest way to do that is by burning it to a CD (either a CD-ROM with MP3 files, or - if it fits - a normal audio CD). Not every CD player has the greatest seeking features, though. I've got one whose fast-forward is more of a normal-speed-forward, and another that actually goes forward when rewinding an MP3 at the slowest level.

I figured one way of working around these issues - which could come into play for podcast episodes that are, like, an hour long - would be to split the podcast into segments of five minutes each. You'd need to make a normal audio CD (which means a limit of 75 or 80 minutes or so), but you could have gapless playback, while also being able to use track selection to go forward and back in chunks.

Yesterday I put together a small Windows application to help with this. It's called Cue Sheet Generator, and it takes in one or more audio files and converts them to either a set of .wav files (to burn with Windows Media Player Legacy or another app with gapless burning support) or a .wav/.cue pair (which ImgBurn and other such apps can handle).

The main program logic is small enough to fit into this post. I wrote it in VB.NET (there's nothing here C# couldn't do, I'm just tired of looking at curly brackets), and I thought it might be helpful to annotate it.

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Breaking podcasts into chunks for burning to CD