Splitting a recording into separate tracks - Audacity Manual Super easy to do. Back in the Cool Edit days I digitized hundreds of LPs by hand, it is a bit of a chore.
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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That's what I'm doing atm.
Audacity can automatically insert labels at silences - it's detailed in that link. It does all the work for you.
MusicBrainz won't help, because every rip will have enough variance to thwart digital identification. Also, the song lengths will be off because your beginning and end times will differ from CD rips, and this will compound until you're significantly off course by the end. I'll be happy if someone posts a better method, but I'm still using Audacity and setting manual track labels.
Technically - doable.
As someone who's never had a vinyl - this would be my angle of attack:
- Slice the first 10 (or however many are necessary) seconds of the track
- Hit some Shazam or Google API with the slice
- Get the title
- Hit Music Brainz API (or some other) to get the legth of the track
- Cut the single track into
title+remainder - Rinse and repeat.
ffmpeg could deal with cutting the file
cUrl can hit the APIs
some shell script (bash would be my choice) would tie it all together
For CDs I use EAC and its various engines it offers for data. As far as vinyl, I also use Audacity but instead of breaking up the album by songs, I break it up by sides. Ex, instead of ripping the Wall as 23 tracks, one per song, I'd rip it as 4 tracks, one per song.
I'm an album snob. I usually listen to a full album at a time and in order, so this works for me and is a lot less effort. I fill in the metadata manually. In this case, it would be tracks 1 thru 4 and track titles "The Wall Side 1" and etc.
That was my answer to the problem you ran into. If there's certain tracks I want to isolate later, I'll edit the file and make a new file with just that track. In this example, you might decide to take "Comfortably Numb" and give it a separate track and put it on a separate folder from the files of the album. I don't do that a whole lot, but I have done it. It's not perfect, but it works for me.
I recommend using the free program called CD Wave.
what would be the best method of getting cue files though. Because just creating them myself by hand would be just as tedious as just splitting the files myself.
@honk Haven't tried myself but maybe scope to use a "label" track and export multiple? manual.audacityteam.org/man/ex…
You may have some degree of success in auto labelling depending on the audio and threshold levels bytefreaks.net/applications/au…
Labeling the parts of the song and then exporting multiple is how I currently do it.
The auto labelling actually somewhat works. The error rate is relatively high though. Set the threshold too low and the background noise of the record will make it detect nothing. Setting it too high and even small quieter parts get detected. It's far from being "automated" but it actually helps a bit. Thank you.