Considering cuetools only works for lossless formats (unfortunately), what's the best alternative for splitting albums that are a single mp3 file bundled with a cue sheet? I've tried a couple and it seems like they never split it accurately, mainly in how there's a noticable "skip" or "gap" when one track transitions into the next when a song continues into the next. Anyone have any ideas?

Uh, medieval cue splitter? Fast, I don'tk now about accurate though.

Have you tried Audacity? If not, give it a try, it's free.

Audacity: Free Audio Editor and Recorder (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/)

jizames

I'm not sure why mp3s are still used so much. Here's the problem. With every mp3 made, there are errors introduced at the beginning and end of the file. I've tested many encoders - they all suffer the same issue if differently.

For instance, say you got a music CD where practically every track is 'joined up' together. Convert the pcm wavs to mp3. All would seem ok, except for the gaps on playback - but that's a player issue right? No. Using a wav editing program - like soundForge, take those mp3s and compare them with the wavs taken directly off the CD. They are clearly corrupted at the start and end. That's why I believe FLAC is more popular, because a CD can be burned which is like the original.

Time to replace mp3s is here:

Something which has been overlooked is mp4/aac. This is a great format. It compresses really well, and 'preserves' the wav in terms of not having faults at the beginning and end of the file. And they have tags too. You can also reverse them into wavs and make CDs which are as good as the original, depending on the bit-rate used of course. A 320 rate is more than adequate. The bit rates on Nero's mp4/aac go up to 480 I believe. But there, you may just as well use a FLAC.

I'm hoping a new generation of FLAC encoder will have even better compression ability.

Nero has a great encoder. And it has never failed in reading a music CD.

So splitting mp3s is best done by converting the mp3 to wav, then splitting the wav and converting to mp4 of a similar rate of the mp3 (there's no point going much higher as the resolution would have been lost any way). With the mp4 or aac your music will not be corrupted.

On the other had if you want to make a CD from one long mp3, take the whole wav and split inside Nero, or CD Architect. These programs will create splits on the correct boundaries of the wav/CD, so that you don't get glitches when one track rolls into the next. Or another option is to use soundForge and place markers throughout the wav (it's arbitrary at this stage - put them anywhere you like) - and save the file with meta data. Take this new wav with marker data and load it into Nero - you will have an option to split the file into n parts based on the markers you specified - and Nero will adjust the positions so that they 'snap' to the nearest boundary - you won't notice this on play back because the gaps/blocks are quite small.

Phew.

For me, I say thanks for this info. I just started last month/year editing using Audacity with my DVD rips and saving as waves for CD's. So, I'm still learning about audio, so any help is good.