How to Split FLAC with a CUE Sheet Without Installing Software

A whole album as one FLAC with a .cue file next to it is a common way to keep a CD rip. It plays fine in some players and not at all as separate songs in most others. Here is how to turn it into lossless, tagged tracks with nothing installed, using our free FLAC + CUE splitter.

The splitter reads the .cue sheet itself. Pick the FLAC and its .cue together, check the tracks it lists, and split. Below is what it takes from the sheet, the ways to load it, and what comes out, with a worked example.

Reading the sheet

What's inside a .cue file.

A .cue is plain text, so you can open it in any text editor to see what it holds. Here is a short, invented example for a four-track album:

REM GENRE Jazz
REM DATE 1998
PERFORMER "The Lantern Quartet"
TITLE "Night Ferry"
FILE "Night Ferry.flac" WAVE
  TRACK 01 AUDIO
    TITLE "Harbor Lights"
    PERFORMER "The Lantern Quartet"
    INDEX 01 00:00:00
  TRACK 02 AUDIO
    TITLE "Slow Engine"
    PERFORMER "The Lantern Quartet"
    INDEX 00 04:12:40
    INDEX 01 04:14:05
  TRACK 03 AUDIO
    TITLE "Northbound"
    PERFORMER "Ada Moss"
    INDEX 01 09:58:62
  TRACK 04 AUDIO
    TITLE "Last Ferry Home"
    PERFORMER "The Lantern Quartet"
    INDEX 01 14:31:10

Top of the file

The album's PERFORMER and TITLE, and often REM DATE and REM GENRE. The splitter puts these into Album info as Artist, Album, Year and Genre, wherever those fields are still empty.

Each TRACK block

The song's own TITLE, usually a PERFORMER, and one or two INDEX lines. Each block becomes one track, with its own title and artist. A data track on an enhanced CD is skipped.

INDEX 01

Where the track starts, and the time the splitter cuts at. INDEX 00, when present, marks the gap before the track (the pregap); it's skipped, so the pregap stays at the end of the track before and each song starts on its first note.

MM:SS:FF

CUE times are minutes, seconds and frames, and a frame is 1/75 of a second (a CD sector). So 09:58:62 is 9 minutes, 58 seconds and 62/75 of a second. The splitter keeps that to the hundredth and shows it as 9:58.83.

Loading the sheet

Three ways in.

• Pick both files at once. In the file picker, select the FLAC and its .cue together. The tracks come from the sheet as the audio loads. You can also pick the .cue on its own first; the splitter says how many tracks it read and asks for the audio next.
• Load it into the paste box. After the audio is up, tick "Paste timestamps as text" and use "Load a .cue file". The sheet lands in the box; press Submit.
• Paste its text. Copy the whole .cue from a text editor or a forum post into the same box and press Submit. It's recognised as a cue sheet, not a tracklist.

Cue sheets from older rippers are often not UTF-8. Windows-1252 and, for Japanese releases, Shift-JIS are detected along with UTF-8 and UTF-16, so accented and Japanese titles come through intact.

If you only have part of a sheet, you can still paste lines by hand, hundredths included, such as 9:58.83 Ada Moss - Northbound. Don't paste a cue time with its frames as a plain line: 04:14:05 on its own reads as 4 hours, 14 minutes and 5 seconds.

Splitting

Four steps to lossless tracks.

1. 01

   Pick the FLAC and the .cue

   Open the FLAC + CUE splitter and choose the file named on the sheet's FILE line together with the .cue. 16-bit and 24-bit both work, up to 450 MB. If the image is in another format, such as APE or WavPack, convert it to FLAC first and keep the same .cue; those aren't accepted.

2. 02

   Check the rows

   Every TRACK is now a row with its title, performer and INDEX 01 start. Play from a few starts on the waveform, and fix any title or time that looks off.

3. 03

   Finish Album info

   Artist, Album, Year and Genre are filled from the sheet where they were empty; change any you like. Add the cover image (often a cover.jpg or folder.jpg beside the rip). Leave the format on "Keep original".

4. 04

   Split and download

   Press "Split & download". The file is uploaded over HTTPS, cut on our server with FFmpeg, and deleted once your downloads are ready. Take the zip, or download tracks one at a time.

What you get

The same samples, properly tagged.

With "Keep original", each track is re-encoded to FLAC losslessly: only the compression is redone, and the decoded samples are identical to the source. A 24-bit rip stays 24-bit. Every file gets Vorbis comment tags for title, artist, album, year, genre and track number, and the cover is embedded as a picture block, so players that show FLAC artwork don't need a separate image in the folder. If you would rather have MP3s for a phone or car, pick MP3 at up to 320 kbps instead.

The cuts are sample-exact. Start times are kept to the hundredth of a second, so a cue's 1/75-second frames are no longer rounded off, and FLAC and WAV are cut on the exact sample. On a gapless album, such as a live record or a continuous mix, nothing is clipped from the start or end of a track.

The zip also holds a fresh .cue for the original file, named after the album, next to a timestamps.txt of the tracklist. Keep it with the single-file image and players such as foobar2000 can still show the tracks. If you have a tracklist but no .cue at all, the free tracklist to CUE converter writes one for you to copy or download.

If you split .cue rips by the folderful, desktop programs such as foobar2000, CUETools and flacon can work through many albums at once and offline. They need installing, and each works a little differently.

FAQ

Common questions.

Can I upload the .cue file to the splitter?

Yes. Pick it together with the FLAC, pick it first and then the audio, use "Load a .cue file" in the paste box, or paste the sheet's text and press Submit. Titles, performers, album info and each INDEX 01 start are read from it.

Is splitting a FLAC this way really lossless?

Yes. "Keep original" re-encodes each track to FLAC losslessly, so the decoded audio is sample-for-sample the same as the source, and the bit depth is kept. The cuts land on the exact sample at the cue's start times.

My .cue has several FILE lines. What then?

If there's one FILE per track, the album is already split and the sheet is just a playlist. If the sheet covers several images, such as one per disc, split one file at a time: the tracks for the FILE named like your upload are used, and a note says the sheet refers to other files too.

The titles come out garbled.

UTF-8, UTF-16, Windows-1252 and Shift-JIS sheets are detected automatically. If a sheet in another encoding still looks wrong, save it as UTF-8 in a text editor and load it again, or fix the titles in the rows.

My FLAC is over 450 MB.

That is the per-file limit. A CD-length FLAC is usually well under it; very long or high-resolution images may not be. Splitting it into two files first, each with its own part of the tracklist, gets around it.