Performing a clean high quality rip of a CD often results with a large single file such as a FLAC or WAV depending on how it’s been ripped. In my case, it’s a big .flac audio file which includes several tracks along with a .cue file which includes track start times. I’ve tried a variety of GUI applications, but I’ve found that the easiest and most simplest way of splitting up these types of audio files is to just do it in a terminal.
First, be sure that cuetools shntool and flac are installed which will allow you to run cuebreakpoints and shnsplit. If your single file happens to be a wave (.wv) then also install wavpack. The tool cuebreakpoints reads the break-points from the cue file which can be piped into shnsplit which is the program used to split up the tracks from the single file.
sudo apt install cuetools shntool flacNow, navigate to the folder where the cue and flac files are located and run the following command.
cuebreakpoints file.cue | shnsplit -o flac file.flacIn my case, I’m splitting up the album Belus by Burzum, which looks like this:
Ignore “bad character”. This is likely due to the Swedish characters in the track names.
The end result is eight new tracks.
The end result isn’t perfect as I’ll have to rename and properly tag each file with Kid3-qt, but this is the easiest method I know of for splitting
Note: If you’re working with a wave file (with the .wv extension), I like to convert to FLAC before splitting:
wvunpack audiofile.wv -o - | flac - -o audiofile.flac