Someone on alt.binaries.sounds.lossless likes to post CDs this way.

For me this works out fine if I simply want to burn the entire CD. I simply decompress the .ape file, and the .cue that comes along with it is designed to burn the CD and break the single huge extracted wav into the individual tracks on the CD.

But what's the best way to extract MP3's from this format? I wouldn't want to burn the CD then rip that burned CD with EAC.. besides the fact that I think there might be an easier way, I'm afraid doing it like that would introduce some errors.

Anyone familiar with this style?

First you need to convert your .APE to .WAV file.
Then you must split your WAVE with WAVE splitting utility, which can use .CUE files (cuesheets) - search for something like "Wav Split", "Wave Split" etc.
Then you convert splitted .WAVs to MP3.

I'm sure there are another ways, but this is the one that I can figure out.

There is a plugin for WinAmp (mp3cue) which can show you different tracks in WinAmp when you select the whole APE (or MP3 or WAV...) using the info from the CUEsheet. Maybe if you install this plugin and set WinAmp's output to
some MP3 encoder you can do directly APE to splitted MP3s, but I'm not sure.
You can try and then tell us what happened.

EAC has an option 'Split WAV by CUE sheet'
So decompress the.ape to .wav with Monkey. Then split this wav to individual wavs with EAC. Then it depends on the audio itself. If it is continuous audio (live or mix), I happen to fade in and fade out the indvidual tracks before encoding to mp3.
You could do this with any audio editor, even with the build-in wav editor in EAC.
Then encode to mp3 using your favourite frontend.

If you are familiar with lame, try Lame with Cuesheet Input. It is my private modification for lame-3.93.1 to handle cuesheet and ape files. You can encode directly from CDImage.wav and CDImage.cue, or CDImage.ape and CDImage.ape.cue with this binary.
I suppose that you have CDImage.ape and CDImage.ape.cue, you can encode all the tracks with tag information by (_basename is a base name for mp3 files)

If you want to extract specific tracks, use option "--track".

Don't foget to put MACDLL.dll to the folder where the binary is located. Happy encoding

Great work, nyaochi.

I tried to download the binaries, but I couldn't.
Where I can get these binaries?
I can host the binaries on a free server in my country, there will be no problem, It will be a pleasure for me.

Edit: OK, I got the file, I just had to rename the link, because the link pointed to a .ZI not a .ZIP file.
Now I need only "LAME with APE input"...

That's fine.
Now I'm compiling "Lame with only APE input", so wait a moment please.

Edit: Done! You can get the binary from Lame with Monkey's Audio (APE) Input in the same manner.

OK, thanks nyaochi.

I've downloaded the other file also. I'll upload them into my private web space this afternoon if you don't mind.
I'll post the links here.

Fine. I will add links to your web space. Thank you.

couldn't you mount the cuesheet in daemon tools and then use your favourite ripper to extract?

You beat me to it, Dreamliner!
That´s exactly what I was going to suggest!
Convert from ape to wav and then mount the image with daemon tools, then you can use EAC.

Or, for the really brave and devout WinAmp 2.x user, run APL on the CUE and import the list of APL's into WinAmp and turn on Filewriter.dll or out_lame.dll

Could be disasterous tho', who knows? But a hell of a lot less clutter.

Well that was actually my first thought, but considering all of the functions and optimizations that EAC uses to deal with actual CD-ROM drives and not hard drive emulations there of (like C2 error correction info and whatever else) I figured it might create some problems.

I think I'll give it a shot though and compare it with some other suggestions from this thread. Maybe all of the resulting wavs and mp3s will be identical, then it will just come down to a matter of speed and convenience.

Well, AFAIK cd image emulated drivers don't need any additional corrections and optimizations when it comes to ripping. They are 100% accurate, 0 offset.. and so, because the cd is already ripped. But if somebody screwed up with ripping than even EAC won't help you with mounted image. So you can use EAC, Cdex, any other (not buggy) ripper safely.

I'm using EAC at the moment, anyone know which one of these gap handling options is most like the way EAC handles gaps when you rip wavs from a CD?

Can anyone answers Fender's question? I'm curious just the same as to which type of gap setting should be used when using EAC to split wav by cue sheet.

Choose 'with gaps'.

That way you get the same result as you would rip the cd as seperate tracks (like any other ripper and eac's default setting).

Hey nyaochi

How do you use id3v2 tags with your super lame (which I love by the way)? Your --add-id3v2 option does not work with the compile I got from http://rarewares.hydrogenaudio.org/mp3.php.

--add-id3v2 option is not mine but LAME's. Just put '--add-id3v2' in LAME command line and don't forget to put '--tag' option in cuesheet command line. Complete command line should be something like:

I want to take this thread to notify an important update of cuesheet modification. Today I fixed a serious problem concerning track length and LAME VBR tag and released cuesheet modification version 0.5.3. I strongly suggest that you discard the older versions. I am embarrassed by the discovery that I stepped on a land mine of LAME .

Older versions do not seem to output last a few frames and to generate proper LAME VBR tag information of each track in non-gapless mode (i.e., without --gapless option) because we fail to clear padding or encoder delay information stored in libmp3lame. I should have clear or reinitialize gfc->mf_samples_to_encode every time the encoder finished one track.

If you do not care about gapless playback, the problem does not matter because the last few frames contains only silence inserted necessarily by LAME. However, if you do care about gapless playback, please use this version. Sorry for the trouble.

Thanks,
Nyaochi

FooBar's diskwriter can extract individual tracks from a cuesheet and file. Case's clienc plugin can even convert the tracks to .mp3 for you. In fact, FooBar can tag and replaygain the files, too.

One tool can do it all.

Why don't you just use Monkey's Audio or foobar2000 for this job?

Monkey's Audio

1. Run MakeAPL to create the .apl files from the .ape+.cue (be sure to have the correct .ape filename and extension in the .cue file).

2. Monkey's Audio --> menu Mode --> click Compress;

3. Monkey's Audio --> menu Mode --> Compression Level --> External --> Lame --> click Lame;

4. Monkey's Audio --> menu Mode --> Compression Level --> External --> Lame --> configure;

In this windows you'll have the following string, IIRC: "--r3mix -b128". Use Lame 3.90.3 (don't forget to copy the file lame.exe to the External folder of Monkey's Audio) and replace the previous string with this one:"--alt-preset standard" (without the quotations marks).

5. Monkey's Audio --> menu Mode --> Convert; You have to do this or the next step won't function.

6. Drag the folder with the .apl files to Monkey's Audio or use the File menu entries "Add File(s)..." or "Add Folder..." (from what I remember you have to drag the folder containing the .apl files 'cause it doesn't work if you drag the .apl files)

This procedure is also valid if you choose any other CLI encoder.

foobar2000

An alternative way to do what you want is to use foobar2000 player. You must also have the lame encoder and the CLI encoder plugin (which must be extracted to foobar2000's folder).

Start foobar2000 and open its preferences window. Look for the DiskWriter config in the Components section and you can choose the output directory. Normally you have to make sure that "Use DSP" and "Use replaygain" options are disabled and that you have the Output format set to "CLI encoder".

Then you must go to the "CLI encoder" (subsection of Diskwriter) and indicate the location of lame.exe and put "mp3" for the extension. In the parameters edit box you put this string: "--alt-preset standard - %d" (without the quotations marks). Close the preferences window and load the .cue file (make sure that the .cue file has the correct .ape filename in it) dragging it to foobar2000's window. Then select all tracks you want to convert to mp3, right click them, choose Convert --> Run conversion.

Regarding the tags: I think it's possible to make tagging automatic in both methods, though I don't know how, 'cause I always set the tags afer.

That's it...

Hey, everybody!

Hope I'm not just repeating something already said, but I just figured this out today.
First I downloaded this package:
LAME 3.90.3 Modified and with APE & Cuesheet support
Then I dropped lameAPE.exe into %path% (C:\WINNT\system32 on my system). MACDll.dll must be present at the same location, but if you have Monkey's Audio installed it's there already. Then i wrote the following batch file and saved it down as ape+cue=mp3.bat:

Ofcourse the batch-file must be modified to fit with path and filname each time, but it works just fine and it's not all that much hassle. B)

What I'm wondering about is whether it's actually necessary to decompress the ape file first and then burn when you want to make an audio cd from your ape+cue. Isn't there an easier pipeline here. Nero with the ape plugin, maybe? Does Feurio take ape input? Anybody have an idea?


Edit:
Slightly more elegant version:


Advantages by using this setup:

+ batchfile compared to method with Monkey's Audio as frontend I think is:
1) Direct pipeline, no temporary *.wav files created on harddisk.
2) Cuesheet input - no messing with *.apl files.

For some reason I had to use $ switch for namingrule ( $p not %p), % switch made the setup not work..... dunno why....?

Otherwise, if you don't like batch-files, then foobar2000 is probably the best GUI for doing this.

--------------------------------------------

EDIT ONCE MORE AGAIN:

Even better batch file:


Now you have to rename the apemodified lame.exe to lameAPE.exe since they changed that at Rarewares.org. Also you must still edit the paths to fit with yours, but you just copy and paste cuesheet name at promt.

You can also replace the obsolete MACDLL.dll with the latest found here and it works just fine.

Also the great piece of sofware Burrrn have come to my attention since I first posted this (my first) post. It will make a cd directly from ape + cue (and all kinds of other formats too... check it out!)

Ehh... sorry,
was a bit in a hurry, went back and read some earlier posts, seems all of this was said long time ago..... ok, sorry....
Edit:
.............and still I went back and edited it.... hmmmmmm........

And, yes: I tried burning CD directly from ape+cue with Nero 6.0.0.11 with Mausau's ape-plugin http://neroplugins.cd-rw.org/files/nxmyape.zip

Seems to work perfectly......

Now I'll shut up.

I agree, works just rite

Sorry for resurrecting an old thread


Maybe you're not using this .bat anymore, but you know that you can use %1 %2 %3 ... %n to represent commandline parameters in a batch file? so instead of having to edit your file every time, you could use this instead:

and on the commandline, use

Eh, no I'm developed it as far as this by now:

Which leaves me with copy&paste of cuesheet name.......
But your suggestion looks far much more intelligent. But I'm almost falling into bed now so I'll have to look at it later when my brain starts (half) working again. I'll probably edit that (my first HA posting) accordingly when I have found the batchfile I like the best.....

Thanks!

Looks nice here's another thing i like to do:

if you do

instead of just pause, you won't get the "press any key to continue"
So you can make your own message, e.g.

Here's a new one:



I basically wanted something that can be invoked by doubleclicking the batch-file. Invoking it from commandline with arguments are too troublesome and/or foreign for some people.
In this version full paths for cuesheet and output directories must be entered at promt. This is good if these keep changing. If you use same source and destination directories each time you can just revert to the way it was done in my last version (2 posts above).

To repeat: This needs LAME 3.90.3 Modified and with APE & Cuesheet support and MACDll.dll (use the latest version for full 3.99u4 support). Rename lame.exe to lameAPE.exe and drop lameAPE.exe and MACDll.dll into %PATH% (e.g. system32). Then make a file "ape+cue=mp3.bat" with Notepad or Vim or whatever containing the above text.

Thanks for help, WarBird!
Cheers!

EDIT:
Note: As this version of lame are a ICL4.5 compile, it's possible it needs Intels libmmd.dll in %PATH%.
It's also possible that the new MACDll will need Microsofts unicows.dll in %PATH% on 95/98/Me systems.

EDIT 2:
It just came to my attention that the syntax SET /P variable=[promptString] are only available on Win2k and up. So this batchfile will not run on earlier versions of WinOS. So if you are using e.g. Win98 adapt one of the earlier versions or even better: Just do as WarBird suggested 3 posts up.
(I also think that the purely cosmetic TITLE option are useless on earlier WinOS than Win2k.)

9x version:
Then:

I think this is easier by using foobar. Install it with the commandline encoder plugin, specificy path to lame exe in the diskwriter options. Add files to playlist. Mark them, rightclick>convert>run conversion. Select lame...wait...

Done.

Agreed. But at the time this batchfile was initialized I hadn't really started using foobar2000 yet, and now that this thread was resurrected from the dead I just made a few small improvements. I myself use foobar2000 almost exclusively for all kinds of tasks these days (also I hardly make mp3's anymore, I don't own a portable so there's no reason not to use musepack)...... But that said: I think it's nice to have a non-GUI solution that can perform this task too, simply to have at least one alternative method for those, if any, that for some reason or another would want that. And it's really not difficult to use: Doubleclick batchfile, copy & paste in cusheet and outputdirs name/path, hit enter, and soon that single ape + cue are transformed into individual mp3's.....

EDIT: Typo