2.7 KiB
shntool
shntool is a multi-purpose data processing utility. With it audio files of a wide array of codecs - like flac - can be edited.
Setup
shntool can be installed on most distributions by installing the shntool package.
Usage
Splitting Audio Files According to a CUE File
An easy way to split audio files according to a cue file is
using shnsplit.
Alternatively the interface cuebreakpoints can be used which uses shnsplit.
Note that some codecs require special setup.
These codecs are referenced in the end of this section.
The following line of shell command splits an audio file according to a cue file.
The -o tag specifies the output file format - for example flac.
cuebreakpoints '<cue file>' | shnsplit -o '<codec>' '<audio file>'
Omitting of the -o flag will result in output files with the .wav filetype.
Alternatively the usage of cuebreakpoints can be avoided with the following
command.
shnsplit -f '<cue file>' -o '<codec>' '<audio file>'
Another option is to use cue2tracks.
This has the advantage that tags for album title, song name and others are set
while splitting the files.
An example command looks like the following.
The audio file is not mentioned in the command.
cue2tracks '<cue file>'
For any of these commands there can be problems with splitting files.
It then is recommended to convert the file to the also lossless .wav format,
split the files and convert it back to the desired codec.
For ape files a special package needs to be installed to be able to split them as explained by
Ciro Santilli.
This package is called flacon.
It is normally used as a GUI for shntool but comes with the codecs needed.
It is usually available in a package of the name flacon.
On Ubuntu systems the repository first has to be added by running the following command.
add-apt-repository -y ppa:flacon
Afterwards flacon can be installed like a normal package.
Troubleshooting
Unable to Split Audio Files
This error occurs when
splitting audio files according to cue files.
High quality flac files with older .cue files that use the format mm:ss:ff
might split the file at the wrong timings.
The format mm:ss:ff is not compatible with the newer versions of
cuebreakpoints, cue2tracks and shnsplit.
To get the correct timings the .cue file has to be changed to use the format
mm:ss:fff.
It is recommended to use the shnsplit alternative in this case.