Splitting flac and ape files in Debian / Ubuntu

I keep forgetting this one, so I'll keep it here.

What to do when you get a cue file with a single huge flac file, or even worse, an ape file? With the right packages it's an easy task (getting the packages right may be hard tough).

There are three parts to this problem: getting the ape file to a more user friendly format (flac), splitting it and then renaming the splitted files.

Needed packages

wget http://members.iinet.net.au/~aidanjm/mac-3.99-u4_b3-1_i386.deb && 
   sudo dpkg -i mac-3.99-u4_b3-1_i386.deb && 
   rm -f mac-3.99-u4_b3-1_i386.deb

Source: http://aidanjm.wordpress.com/2007/01/26/using-monkeys-audio-ape-files-in-ubuntu/

Now install cuetools:

  sudo apt-get install cuetools

Splitting the file

  cuebreakpoints *.cue|shnsplit *.ape -o flac

Renaming the splitted parts

In the cue file there should be a list of the original file names. I hacked a script to parse & rename the files from the previous step, you can get it here: cue-rename

For this script to run you'll need php-cli package. Just run it in the same folder the cue file is, as any other bash script. There's a flag to get a preview instead of a complete rename; it's somewhere in the file and I don't have much plans to clean it up anytime soon. Drop me a line if you do.