Ripping a cd with many small tracks

I bought an audio book on cd that I want to play from my mp3 library. But it is annoyingly broken into a million tracks, each one minute long.

I ripped the whole shebang (17 cds) into over 1,000 tracks. I was planning on going through the mess and using Audacity to glue together the tracks that break in the middle of a sentence. Boring. And error prone. Of course there is a better way. The first, and sufficient, better way I stumbled on is to use gstreamer to rip each cd into a single mp3 file. Perfect. Here’s the incantation:

gst-launch cdparanoia ! lame ! filesink location=chapter01-02.mp3