Re: Is splitting and joining tracks a strictly lossless procedure
Reply #1 – 2021-06-28 00:01:49
Splitting and joining may be lossless. That's the best answer you can get. (its the same for splitting an stereo file to 2 mono files) If it's lossless and bit-perfect or not depends on program code. Why? Because some audio editors treat cut/copy commands the same than other edits (gain, filtering, etc.), thus they do 32 bit conversion on the fly... and even if you don't dither, if you just save the files -as is- after slicing... and you merge the files again, you will not get a bit perfect clone of the original. The same can be said about merging and then splitting. Now, whether the difference is audible or not is another discussion (in short: no), but is not bitperfect . sox can do it right. Audition doesn't. Izotope doesnt. (*) Sox Join sox "00.flac" "01.flac" "out.flac" To split again sox "out.flac" "00.flac" trim 0 0.427 sox "out.flac" "01.flac" trim 0.427 -0 Splitting a cue file should be both lossless and bit-perfect in "most" programs if coded right, though. In some programs it's only lossless... because technically you split it into multiple lossless tracks, but it's not bitperfect since gap handling differs (and you can not get the original file then). I consider that lossless because you can also perfectly match the audio parts of the original and split tracks. i.e. what's converted, is done right. Is the missing part (gaps) the one mismatching. (**) (*) There are also other problems in the equation. Izotope RX5 had a bug which made loading and saving right away a flac file without doing anything, to not produce a bit-perfect copy.... it was never fixed. Reported it multiple times. You would say that's a minimum for a program which costs thousands of dollars hahaha. You have to save to wav and then convert the wav to flac in another program as workaround. (**) Contrary to DAWs like audition, etc. where you are also exporting not bit-perfect copies of the portions of audio. EDIT: About foobar, if you are talking about using converter... merging tracks into one file is bitperfect.Splitting (if you force the same break points than the input) too. A tool specifically thought to do what you want is cue tools: Select encode: single file + cue. All in one step. Edit the cue according to your corrected break points.