Skip to main content ↑ ↓

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: Splitting flac album with cue file without transcoding. (Read 5666 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Splitting flac album with cue file without transcoding.

Okay, I recently received a flac album (one file) that has a cue file along with it.  I wanted to know if any of the Mac rippers/encoders available are capable of splitting this file without transcoding it to another format or even within the same format.  I tried using XLD by just going to the file menu, selecting open, selecting the cue file and then selecting "decode".  This process was pretty lengthy, so I'm guessing that XLD was splitting and then transcoding the files to the FLAC options that I had set in the preferences of the program.  Now, this post, Using the Open Raw PCM (bin+cue) , over on Macrumors.com mentions using the "Open Raw PCM (bin+cue)" option under the file menu within XLD, but I'm guessing using that method will also result in transcoding.

Does anyone know of how to accomplish the splitting of a single, flac file album using cue sheet without transcoding?

Thanks beforehand.

Splitting flac album with cue file without transcoding.

Reply #1 –
That's not possible. Track boundaries won't match FLAC frame boundaries, so the first frame of the second track will have to be shorter than the rest, and FLAC subset doesn't allow variable frame sizes.
CUETools 2.1.6

Splitting flac album with cue file without transcoding.

Reply #2 –
Can I ask why? I assume you know that no quality is lost in conversions between lossless and uncompressed WAV/AIFF/PCM.

Splitting flac album with cue file without transcoding.

Reply #3 –
Quote from: dv1989 on
Can I ask why? I assume you know that no quality is lost in conversions between lossless and uncompressed WAV/AIFF/PCM.


Yeah, I do know that, but I'm not trying to convert to AIFF or WAV. I'm mainly just trying to keep the files as FLAC (at the same level of compression as the original file) but not have them converted from FLAC to FLAC (with either less or more compression than the original file, based on my FLAC settings within XLD or whichever program I'm using) when I really just want the file split, for example, as Cue Splitter is able to do with mp3 files.

Splitting flac album with cue file without transcoding.

Reply #4 –
Quote from: Gregory S. Chudov on
That's not possible. Track boundaries won't match FLAC frame boundaries, so the first frame of the second track will have to be shorter than the rest, and FLAC subset doesn't allow variable frame sizes.


So, FLAC tracks are divided into frames of equal length based on the track's length? So, transcoding is a must with FLAC image files with cuesheets?  Does any other lossless format allow the splitting of an image file without transcoding?

Thanks for the information.

Splitting flac album with cue file without transcoding.

Reply #5 –
In FLAC, as in most lossless codecs, only the last frame is allowed to be shorter than the rest. All other frames usually have default size of 4096 or 4608 samples.

Why does transcoding bother you? Lossless transcoding is not exactly a transcoding, because every bit of information is preserved. And with FLAC it can be very fast, even faster than splitting a WAV, because there'll be less work for HDD.
CUETools 2.1.6

Splitting flac album with cue file without transcoding.

Reply #6 –
Quote from: Gregory S. Chudov on
In FLAC, as in most lossless codecs, only the last frame is allowed to be shorter than the rest. All other frames usually have default size of 4096 or 4608 samples.

Why does transcoding bother you? Lossless transcoding is not exactly a transcoding, because every bit of information is preserved. And with FLAC it can be very fast, even faster than splitting a WAV, because there'll be less work for HDD.


Well, I guess it's just the time spent transcoding that bothers me.  I figured that, if I could bypass the transcoding, then the splitting of the file would definitely be less than one minute, which is better than the 5-10 minutes it takes now including transcoding.

Once again, thanks for the insight.  Didn't know any of the information about lossless codecs that you have presented.