Use cat to combine mp3 files based on filename - bash

Question

I have a large number of downloaded radio programs that consist of 4 mp3 files each. The files are named like so:
Show Name - Nov 28 2011 - Hour 1.mp3
Show Name - Nov 28 2011 - Hour 2.mp3
Show Name - Nov 28 2011 - Hour 3.mp3
Show Name - Nov 28 2011 - Hour 4.mp3
Show Name - Nov 29 2011 - Hour 1.mp3
Show Name - Nov 29 2011 - Hour 2.mp3
Show Name - Nov 29 2011 - Hour 3.mp3
Show Name - Nov 29 2011 - Hour 4.mp3
Show Name - Nov 30 2011 - Hour 1.mp3 and so on...
I have used the cat command to join the files with great success by moving the four files of the same date into a folder and using the wildcard:
cat *.mp3 > example.mp3
The files are all the same bitrate, sampling rate, etc.
What I would like to do is run a script that will look at the file name and combine hours 1-4 of each date and name the file accordingly. Just the show name, the date and drop the 'Hour 1'.
I looked around and found a number of scripts that can be used to move files around based on their names but I'm not adept enough at bash scripting to be able to understand the methods used and adapt them to my needs.
I'm using Ubuntu 14.04.
Many thanks in advance

Answer 1

You can use a bash for loop to find each distinct date name and then construct the expected mp3 names from that.
Because your files have spaces in their names and my solution uses globbing, you'll also have to edit your Internal Field Separator to ignore spaces for the duration of the script.
SAVEIFS=$IFS
IFS=$'\n\b'
for mdy in `/bin/ls *mp3 | cut -d' ' -f'4,5,6' | sort -u`; do
cat *${mdy}*.mp3 > "showName_${mdy}_full.mp3"
done
IFS=$SAVEIFS
This won't alert you if some hours are missing for some particular date. It'll just join together whatever's there for that date.
Note: The comment pointing out that cat probably won't work for these files is spot on. The resulting file will probably be corrupted. You probably want to use something like mencoder or ffmpeg instead. (Check out this thread.)