Not true - you don't need to re-encode to split a lossless file. I personally use Medieval CUE Splitter (freeware). It's very fast and non-destructive (in otherwords the resulting splits are still bit-for-bit identical to the source FLAC - there is no 're-encoding' as such). It also works for all other lossless formats (certainly all the ones I've tried) - WZ, APE, TAK. You just drag the CUE file into it, and it splits the associated music file accordingly, retaining all tag info from the CUE.

As for burning an album to just one single FLAC - my problem with that is, I don't know of any portable player that currently recognises cue files. I own a Sansa Fuze, which plays FLACs, but can't handle cue files so I always rip my FLACs to individual songs (and split the ones I download in one piece).

I would also be dubious about using Foobar to encode to FLAC. Use the proper 'FLAC frontend' tool to do this (or set up your EAC to use the FLAC encoder), so again, the resulting FLAC is completely non-destructive - in otherwords it can be 'decoded' back to a WAV that is identical to the original WAV. Equally, I would also recommend to use the official encoders/decoders for WV and APE (WavPack Frontend.exe and Monkey's Audio.exe) when endoing/decoding between these and WAV. If you use 3rd party 'converters' there's a massive chance you're doing destructive converting, which degrades the quality. I'm not saying this is the case with Foobar though - I've not tried it - but the medieval cue splitter does the job perfectly. I'm sure there are others out there too.

Any lossless->lossless recompression is non-destructive.

No, you have to be careful about that! There are many substandard crappy 'converters' out there that will 'convert' WAV to FLAC or vica-versa, or FLAC to APE, APE to WAV, etc etc etc - but they do not 'encode/decode' in a lossless way - they 'reconvert' the file, and it's not truly lossless. You get some degradation. For example, Advanced MP3 Converter (great for making quality MP3s) will also 'convert' FLACs to WAV (and vica versa). But it is not 'decoding' them like FLAC frontend does. It is re-converting them to a new WAV file. And there is some subtle degradation of the sound. Again, I'm not saying this is the case with Foobar - not tried it as mine doesn't appear to have the option.

The point is, to retain the original lossless quality, you must use an appropriate 'encoder/decoder', not a 'converter'. So for example, if you have an APE file, but want it in FLAC format - don't use a 'converter'. You must 'decode' the APE back to WAV (e.g. with the Monkey's Audio tool), then encode that WAV into FLAC (e.g. with FLAC frontend tool). That way everything is truly 'lossless'.

Medieval CUE Splitter is not destructive to audio data, however it does not split tracks on sector boundaries, resulting in files with SBEs (Sector Boundary Errors). You can fix SBEs, however this requires re-encoding the files. So, you might as well just split the tracks using foobar2000 or CUETools which will not result in files with SBEs and will be a much simpler and quicker process.


Your doubts about foobar2000 are completely unfounded. Both foobar2000 and CUETools will encode to FLAC losslessly. Also, as stated above, Medieval does not do the job perfectly.

Well, it does it perfectly in the sense the music is not degraded in any way at all. I couldn't care less about SBEs. But I'm glad to read that Foobar2000 does everything even better. I'll look into CUETools as my Foobar2000 doesn't seem to have any encoding/splitting options that I can find.

Not so. You can split a FLAC file (with CUE) without re-encoding.

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How?

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See Recycle Bin: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=75094

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OMG!

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