How can I make a FLAC+cue from multiple FLAC files?

Question

I've tried Googling but can only find guides for the other way around.

I have a few flac files from an album, all properly tagged. I'd like to make them into a single flac file with a cuesheet automatically (ie not pasting into Audacity and making the Cue myself).

Is this possible?

Solution 1

Use shntool, a multipurpose, multiformat command-line tool for manipulating lossless audio files.

shntool join -o flac *.flac

This generates a file joined.flac which contains the audio content of each of the files in *.flac. Note that you might want to specify the names of the FLAC files, rather than leaving it to *.flac. This lets you be sure that the files are joined in the correct order, and that no unwanted FLAC files get included.

shntool cue *.flac > joined.cue

This generates a CUE file joined.cue, a simple text file listing tracks and timings. The same caution about specifying names of the FLAC files applies. (If you are trying these commands in order, joined.flac will now be one of the files caught up in *.flac.)

Solution 2

Cuetools should let you do this - You can select the whole folder the files are in, and select "Embedded" for mode (embedded refers to album art, not the flac file. Select image+cue for a seperate album art image) and "Encode" For action. Select flac for filetype and libflake for the encoder

This will pop up a window that will have several sets of data for the cue sheet - the first one is based off your data, the others off freedb and other sites.

This should give you a single flac file with a cue file.

Comments

[Grand]

Thanks, I already have CueTools, so I don't know why I didn't try poking around in there first. Is it common to use an embedded cuesheet? Is there not better support for having a separate one?

[Thalys]

embedded dosen't refer to the cue sheet, it refers to album art

[slm]

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[mattdm]

Although note that this will include joined.flac in your cue file, which you probably do not want.

[suprjami]

Thanks for the tip about shntool. I was looking to do the opposite (split a single file) and this was perfect.

[DavidPostill]

Please read How do I recommend software for some tips as to how you should go about recommending software. You should provide at least a link, some additional information about the software itself, and how it can be used to solve the problem in the question.