Split .ape files with cue and convert to flac

Split .ape files with cue and convert to flac format is not so difficult.

We do it on an Ubuntu box for example:

First, install the dependency of shntool, flac, mac, cuetools

sudo aptitdue install flac shntool cuetools

and download mac package in form of deb or tarball.

Run the following command in a terminal:

shntool split -f FileName.cue -t '%n. %t' -o flac FileName.ape

and the output .flac files’ name follows this sequence:

1. Track1name.flac

2.Track2name.flac

Update:
2011-02-20:
FFmpeg supports decoding APE format since 0.5 release, and it’s very easy to convert APE to FLAC now:
ffmpeg -i Filename.ape -acodec flac Filename.flac
And Clementine supports CUE+APE/FLAC natively.

2 thoughts on “Split .ape files with cue and convert to flac”

    1. There was a typo on the last line and I’ve corrected it.
      In man page of shntool, we can get:
      -t fmt Name output files in user-specified format based on CUE sheet
      fields. The following formatting strings are recognized:
      %p Performer
      %a Album
      %t Track title
      %n Track number
      so the last two lines mean we can get the split files honors the rules specified as “1. firsttrackname.flac” and so on. Because we use the “split” option, the result files’ names will be the tracks name defined in the cue sheet rather than the original ape file.

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This work by Aron Xu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.