I hope this is okay for me to post in here. It’s about music :)
So I’m currently digitizing my records. This is easy to do for CDs. I got myself a dvd drive and just rip them to flac files on my computer. Tagging is easy too pulling the data from music brainz. Vinyl records are a little bit of a different story though because for each side of a record I get one long audio file. Splitting up the files to individual tracks is a very tedious process. I’m currently doing that manually with audacity and then exporting them to flac files.
Does anyone have an idea to do that more easily? Maybe even automate parts of the process. After all music brainz has all the track lenghts available. So in theory it should be possible to automate this to some degree.
Any ideas are welcome. Thank you.
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.
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.
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 ah, I see
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.
I recommend using the free program called CD Wave.
@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.
@honk I suspect that may be pushing the bounds of what may be currently doable with Audacity unless you explore the realms of plugins or create your own, possibly worth reaching out to the developers of audacity over at GitHub? (Certainly not a “quick” thing to develop unless someone happens to be working on this already)
Only other thing I can think of may be to explore other software options such as Vinyl studio or Pure vinyl. Probably not free and whether actually worth it is debatable.
Only other option I can think of is to ask a third party (or parties) to do the work on your behalf - again likely not cheap unless you have some really good friends 😁
Of course the purists might argue that you are moving away from the sense of the original recording (one long track) but I can wholly appropriate why you want to do it. I do feel your pain though, just sorry I don’t have any easier answers 😕
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.
