Merge mp3 files without recode and make cue sheet pointing to individual tracks?

Question

I have a lot audiobooks, each one is usually split into 20-60 files. It's not comfortable to navigate with audio players if I want to group them into some sets by genre (with [Album artist] ID3 tag set to "Various Artists").

Is there free windows or linux tool or set of tools, whose could do the following?

1. Merge the audiobook files to one mp3 without recoding
2. Carefully build correct CUE sheet with original ID3 tags pointing to former chapters inside new solid mp3 file.

Answer 1

You can easily join mp3 by simple concatenating them.

   cat file1.mp3 file2.mp3 file3.mp3 file4.mp3 file5.mp3 > file-all.mp3

Tags can be extracted with ffprobe:

   ffprobe file1.mp3

Cue sheets is text files, you can read about its format here:

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_sheet_(computing)

Since here questions related to programming, I will not post complete solution.

Answer 2

Don't use MP3, use Matroska (MKV). It supports all of these chapters and what not.

FFmpeg and mkvmerge are tools you can use for this. Use -c:a copy and the audio won't be re-encoded. (MKV support MP3 as a codec.)