splatflac

Split audio tracks to FLAC — ideal for vinyl "image + CUE"

Many vinyl rips are stored as Side A / Side B FLACs with a CUE. You can easily split them with XLD (Mac), but CueTools (Windows) can fail when audio doesn't match Red Book CD format.

Here is a small utility to do one thing correctly.

splatflac.py splits FLAC files using a CUE sheet. By default it re-encodes FLAC outputs to fix STREAMINFO; use --streamcopy to keep original FLAC frames. WAV inputs are re-encoded to FLAC level 8.

Design goals

• Work with vinyl-generated CUE sheets
• No requirement that audio conforms to Red Book CD-DA
• No DSP changes (fades, normalization, or zero-crossing edits)
• Optional stream-copy mode preserves original FLAC frames
• Small, focused, and intentionally limited

What it does

• Parses standard CUE sheets
• Splits each referenced file into per-track FLACs next to the CUE
• Handles per-side track number resets (prefixes like 01-01 - Track One.flac)
• Writes basic tags by default (TRACKNUMBER, TITLE, album-level fields when present)
• Re-encodes WAV to FLAC (level 8) when given a WAV file
• Re-encodes FLAC outputs by default to fix STREAMINFO (MD5/length/samples)

What it does not do

• No guessing or inference
• No DSP or audio editing

Tagging behavior

• By default, splat transcribes explicit metadata from the CUE into FLAC tags
• Use --notagging to disable all tag writing and preserve audio data exactly
• Use --streamcopy to keep original FLAC frames (STREAMINFO may be wrong)

Why this exists

Vinyl rips are continuous PCM captures, not CD images. Tools that reject them as "not Red Book compliant" are technically correct, but unhelpful for vinyl rips.

Requirements

• Python 3.x
• ffmpeg in PATH

Version History

• v0.0.2 – fixes CUE parsing for quotes/apostrophes on Windows; adds CI tests.
• v0.0.1 – re-encodes FLACs to ensure STREAMINFO/MD5 is correct.
• v0.0.0 – initial release.

That's it.