Got an album as one FLAC plus a .cue file? What cue sheets are, why rippers make them, and how to split into tagged tracks without losing a sample.
Sooner or later a rip lands in your library that looks wrong. One enormous FLAC file, an hour long, sitting next to a tiny text file with a .cue extension, and perhaps a .log. Your player shows the album as a single track, or as a list of tracks that mysteriously all point at one file, or refuses to see it at all. Nothing is broken. You've got an image rip, and it's a perfectly valid, arguably superior way to preserve a CD. It's just not a convenient way to listen to one.
A cue sheet is a plain text file that describes the layout of a disc. Open one and you'll find something like this:
PERFORMER "Talk Talk"
TITLE "Spirit of Eden"
FILE "Spirit of Eden.flac" WAVE
TRACK 01 AUDIO
TITLE "The Rainbow"
INDEX 01 00:00:00
TRACK 02 AUDIO
TITLE "Eden"
INDEX 00 09:03:12
INDEX 01 09:05:45
Each INDEX 01 is where a track starts, measured in minutes, seconds and frames, where a frame is 1/75 of a second (the CD's native unit). INDEX 00 marks a pregap: the silence, or sometimes not-silence, that precedes a track on the disc. The FILE line names the audio the timings refer to.
The format dates from a CD-burning program in the 1990s, which is why the vocabulary is about burning. The idea it encodes is simple: here is the whole disc as one continuous stream, and here is exactly where the track markers sit.
A CD is, physically, one continuous spiral of audio with a table of contents pointing at positions along it. Ripping it as one file plus a cue sheet preserves that structure perfectly:
Archival-minded rippers like EAC offer an "image + cue" mode for exactly these reasons, and a lot of well-preserved collections were built that way. If you rip your own CDs, it's a legitimate choice for the archive copy.
The downside is practical. Most players, phones and browsers want one file per track. Per-track tags, cover art per track, skipping to track seven, adding a single song to a playlist: all of that either doesn't work with an image or works only in the handful of players that parse cue sheets internally.
An image rip is a perfect copy of the disc. A track rip is a perfect copy of the music. You want the second one for listening, and the split from one to the other is lossless.
The important reassurance: splitting a FLAC image into tracks loses nothing. The tool decodes the image, cuts the sample stream at the frame positions in the cue sheet, and re-encodes each piece as its own FLAC. Since 1/75 of a second at 44.1 kHz is exactly 588 samples, every cut lands on a precise sample boundary. Decode the tracks afterwards, join them, and you have the original image back, sample for sample.
On the command line, shntool is the classic:
shnsplit -f album.cue -o flac -t "%n - %t" album.flac
This reads the cue, writes one FLAC per track, and names them 01 - The Rainbow.flac and so on. It doesn't apply tags, so follow up with cuetag.sh album.cue *.flac (ships with the cuetools package) to copy titles, performer and track numbers from the cue into each file. Then run your normal tagger to fill in whatever the cue didn't know.
On Windows, foobar2000 opens a cue sheet as a playlist of virtual tracks; select them all, right-click, Convert, and it writes real per-track files with tags. CUETools goes further: it splits, tags, checks the result against the AccurateRip and CTDB databases, and can even repair small rip errors using the database's parity data, which is a remarkable trick.
On a Mac, XLD opens the cue directly and converts it to tracks with a couple of clicks.
A few things trip people up, and they're all quick to fix once you know them.
The FILE line points at the wrong name. Cue sheets written during ripping often reference the WAV that was later converted to FLAC, or a file that has since been renamed. Open the cue in a text editor and make the FILE line match the actual filename. The WAVE keyword at the end can stay; tools ignore it.
Text encoding. Older cue sheets are often in a legacy Windows encoding, and accented characters come through as garbage in a UTF-8 tool. Re-save the cue as UTF-8 before splitting, or fix the tags afterwards.
Pregaps. By default, splitting tools cut at INDEX 01, so the pregap before a track attaches to the end of the previous track, exactly as a CD player counts it. That's correct behaviour and it keeps continuous albums seamless. The exception is audio before track one (INDEX 00 on the first track), which some tools write out as its own 00 file. Keep it if it's a hidden song; delete it if it's two seconds of silence.
"Noncompliant" cue sheets. EAC can write cues where pregap lengths are stored in a slightly different way. Modern tools handle both styles, but if timings look off by a second or two, this is the first thing to check.
Once the tracks exist, do two things before removing the image:
flac -t, so you know each file encoded cleanly. The FLAC integrity check takes seconds per album.Then tag the tracks properly, add the cover art, and file the album where the rest of the library lives.
Even after splitting, leave the .cue (and the .log, if there is one) in the album folder. They're tiny, and they're the record of exactly how the disc was laid out and how cleanly it was ripped. If you ever need to rebuild the image, burn a disc, or prove to yourself that a rip was accurate, they're the only thing that can tell you.
Just split something continuous? Open the player, queue two adjacent tracks from it, and listen to the seam. Done right, you won't be able to find it.
FLACCID plays your local FLAC, ALAC, WAV and more right in the browser: no upload, no account, no streaming.
Launch the Player