[audio] What is the best way to merge mp3 files?

As Thomas Owens pointed out, simply concatenating the files will leave multiple ID3 headers scattered throughout the resulting concatenated file - so the time/bitrate info will be wildly wrong.

You're going to need to use a tool which can combine the audio data for you.

mp3wrap would be ideal for this - it's designed to join together MP3 files, without needing to decode + re-encode the data (which would result in a loss of audio quality) and will also deal with the ID3 tags intelligently.

The resulting file can also be split back into its component parts using the mp3splt tool - mp3wrap adds information to the IDv3 comment to allow this.