Making a digital "mixed tape"


Hi All.  I am putting together a playist for a memorial ceremony for a friend and am using Jriver v 21.0.9 for music management on my laptop.  However, the intended "mixed tape" needs to be saved in a format that other machines can play without having JRiver installed. The "mixed tape" could be in any format (MP4, wave, flac, anything) - though I am assuming all songs should be saved in the same format. On JRiver, I see how one can save the contents (e.g. library) or a playlist to a file, and see that I can export a playlist to a burnable CD, but in this case, I want to export the music to a single file on my hard drive, and then share it with the guy doing the video for the memorial.  Any help would be most appreciated.  Can I do what I need in JRiver?  If not, what other (preferably free) software would do this. If I recall right, I think iTunes might do this, although I'm not psyched to install iTunes on my Dell laptop.

Thanks, Peter

peter_s

Audacity used to allow mixing of songs into one big music file. It was free last time I checked. There are many others that can do it that costs money but some of them allow you to test the software for a week or two and that might be enough for you.

OP, I'm using JRiver since many years, it is not suited for your intended task. You may want to try fre:ac (www.freac.org). It's a free audio converter. The Windows version is available stand-alone from their website or from the Microsoft Store. fre:ac converts freely between all supported formats. No matter if you need WMA to MP3, MP3 to WAV, M4A to MP3, WAV to MP3 or any other conversion, fre:ac supports any combination of formats. fre:ac can query the CDDB/GNUdb online CD database to find artist and title information prior to ripping. No need to enter track names manually. fre:ac can be installed on a USB stick or external drive so you can take it with you and use it on any computer. It will also store its configuration files on the portable drive. That way it will always start up with your custom settings. Activating the hidden function for the task, you are able to transfer all music tracks stored on a computer's hard drive in one single file. Cheers!

OP, in addition to the above, here the tutorial to create a single file

 - Drag the files you want to merge from Windows Explorer into the fre:ac window (below 'artist')

- 'coding', 'coding options', mark 'code in one single file'

- start the conversion/merging with the command  'coding', 'start coding'

- 'store under' dialog windows will open

- add a file name and a destination folder, confirm with 'save'