Many CD rips come as a single long file, such as album.flac or album.ape, with a small .cue text file that says where each track starts. Music players on phones and in cars, and most libraries, want one file per track instead. This splitter reads the cue sheet, cuts the album at exactly the right samples, and writes each track as its own file with the title, artist, album and track number filled in, and the cover picture embedded.
Cutting is sample-accurate and the tracks join without a gap, so a live album or a DJ mix plays straight through. Lossless output is bit-identical: put the FLAC tracks back together and you get the original audio, sample for sample. Monkey's Audio (.ape), WavPack (.wv), TTA, FLAC, WAV, Apple Lossless and MP3 albums can all be split, into FLAC, MP3, WAV or M4A. It is free to use, with no account and no upload limit, and it runs entirely in your browser: nothing is uploaded, and while the page stays open, a feature you have already used keeps working offline.
- Does splitting a FLAC lose quality?
- No. Each track is decoded and encoded again as FLAC, which is lossless, so the audio in the tracks is identical to the album's, bit for bit. The same goes for WAV and M4A (Apple Lossless). Only MP3 is lossy, as it always is.
- Where does the gap between tracks go?
- Some cue sheets mark a pregap: a few seconds of silence (or applause) before a track starts. It stays at the end of the track before, the usual choice, which means nothing is lost and the album still plays without gaps. If the first track has a long pregap, often a hidden track at the start of the CD, it is saved as track 0.
- Why are the track titles garbled?
- Cue sheets are plain text, and older ones were saved in the encoding of the ripper's computer, such as Windows-1251 for Russian or Shift_JIS for Japanese. The splitter works out the encoding, but if the titles still look wrong, pick another under “read as” beside the cue sheet's name. You can also edit any title by hand before splitting.
- Can it convert APE to FLAC?
- Yes. Splitting an .ape album into FLAC tracks converts it at the same time, losslessly. Monkey's Audio is poorly supported by phones, cars and many players, so FLAC is the usual choice. Without a cue sheet this page cannot know where the tracks begin, so it needs the .cue, or a sheet embedded in the file.
- How large an album can it split?
- The album file is read in place rather than loaded into memory, and the album is decoded once, however many tracks it has, so an hour-long album splits into FLAC in about ten seconds on a recent computer, or half a minute for MP3. The finished tracks are held in the browser until you save them, which needs about as much free memory as their total size.