How do I split a flac with a cue?

Question

I've got a full album flac and a cue file for it. How can I split this into a flac per track?

I'm a KDE user, so I would prefer a KDE/Qt way. I would like to see command line and other GUI answers as well, but they are not my preferred method.

Solution 1

If you have cue set to use k3b in in the filetype settings, k3b will automatically split the file if you open the cue file, and allow you to re-rip.

Solution 2

Shnsplit can read a cue file directly, which also means it can access the other data from the cue file (not just the breakpoints) and generate nicer filenames than split-*.flac:

shnsplit -f file.cue -t %n-%t -o flac file.flac

Granted, this makes it more difficult to use cuetag.sh if the original flac file is in the same directory.

Solution 3

Flacon is an intuitive open-source GUI that does exactly that: split a FLAC with a CUE.

Flacon extracts individual tracks from one big audio file containing the entire album of music and saves them as separate audio files. To do this, it uses information from the appropriate CUE file.

It supports among other things:

Supported input formats: WAV, FLAC, APE, WavPack, True Audio (TTA).

Supported out formats: FLAC, WAV, WavPack, AAC, OGG or MP3.

Automatic character set detection for CUE files.

To use it you only need to open the *.cue file with Flacon. It should then automatically detect the big *.flac file (if not, you can specify this manually), and then you should select Flac output format (and optionally configure the encoder), and start the conversion process.

Solution 4

I only know a CLI way. You will need cuetools and shntool.

cuebreakpoints file.cue | shnsplit -o flac file.flac
cuetag.sh file.cue "split-*".flac

Solution 5

if high-quality files are being used, shnsplit is happily erroring out with

shnsplit: error: m:ss.ff format can only be used with CD-quality files

fortunately the flac binary supports --skip=mm:ss.ss and --until=mm:ss.ss so a script can use cuebreakpoints like this:

[..]
time[0]="00:00.00"
c=1
for ts in $(cuebreakpoints "${cue_file}"); do
    time[${c}]=${ts}
    c=$((c+1))
done
time[${c}]='-0'
for ((i=0;i<$((${#time[@]}-1));i++)); do
    trackno=$(($i+1))
    TRACKNUMBER="$(printf %02d ${trackno})"
    title="$(cueprint --track-number ${trackno} -t '%t' "${cue_file}")"
    flac --silent --exhaustive-model-search --skip=${time[$i]} --until=${time[$(($i+1))]} --tag=ARTIST="${ARTIST}" --tag=ALBUM="${ALBUM}" --tag=DATE="${DATE}" --tag=TITLE="${title}" --tag=TRACKNUMBER="${TRACKNUMBER}" "${aud_file}" --output-name="${TRACKNUMBER}-${title}.flac"
done

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Comments

[boehj]

Thanks for this Kambus. I've been using cuebreakpoints file.cue | shnsplit -o flac file.flac for a long time. The 2nd bit is going to help a lot!

[slm]

Welcome to Unix & Linux Stack Exchange! Whilst this may theoretically answer the question, it would be preferable to include the essential parts of the answer here, and provide the link for reference.

[hayath786]

cuetag seems to break on filenames containing spaces but after removing them it worked.

[jwbensley]

Fellow debian users: sudo apt-get install cuetools shntool

[wolfmanx]

You might want to change if os.path.isfile(tmpfile) to if tmpfile != filename and os.path.isfile(tmpfile) to avoid deleting the original file on error.

[wolfmanx]

The condition for setting the track artist must be if len(records)>0.

[coffekid]

This is the only method that worked for me.

[Matthias Urlichs]

cuetools already depends on flac, so …

[coffekid]

I don't like to use UI for things I can do on the terminal, but I was struggling with an album, and this was the only way of splitting the files. You deserve a beer now man

[Gabriel Hautclocq]

On Debian 10 there is a bug with 24 bits flacs. It won't split. It works fine on 16 bits files though.

[bomben]

I did this and my single flac files are not playable.

[Jocelyn delalande]

On Debian Buster, adding debian-multimedia.org repository and installing monkeys-audio package did the trick.

[Diogo Eichert]

Thanks for this answer. I've been looking for a tool exactly like this for a long time now. Excellent recommendation.