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Topic: Joining APE files (Read 3676 times) previous topic - next topic
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Joining APE files

Hey,

After getting a big HD, I decided to kill the old rips of my CD collection I had done (128kbps MP3...not exactly the best) and redo them using Monkeys Audio.  When I first started I was ripping each track to it's own file.  Now I've decided that I prefer ripping using a single APE/CUE combination for each CD.

So my question is, what can I do about the CD's Ive already ripped to individual tracks?  My first thought is to decompress to a bunch of wav's, join them as a single wav, and recompress to APE.  I'd have to manually create the CUE though, and it just sounds like a lot of work.

I'm hoping someone can suggest an easier alternative?  I keep finding out about great programs that do amazing things, so maybe there's one out there I havent heard of that is perfect for this job? 

I didn't rip many CDs with individual tracks, so maybe the easiest alternative is just to re-rip.  But I'd rather leave that as a last resort if I can.

Joining APE files

Reply #1 –
shntool is able to do join individual APE files as a single large APE via the following line:
Code: [Select]
shntool join -o ape *.ape

  Reconstructing your CUE sheets is a little more difficult. Running shntool with the following line will show you the actual lengths (mm:ss:ff) of your individual APE files, from which you can - if patient - build a CUE sheet, by adding the lengths sequentially to locate the indices:
Code: [Select]
shntool len -u mb *.ape

  A while back Jason Jordan told me he was working on an updated version of shntool which could reconstruct CUE sheets... but that was a few months ago, so I'm not sure of the current status. You might try sending him a friendly e-mail (his address is at the bottom of the shntool homepage) mentioning your appreciation and interest, and he'll probably respond; he's a nice guy, and appreciates user feedback.

  For the curious, shntool also manages Shorten (SHN), FLAC, LPAC, OptimFROG (OFR) and WavPack (WV) lossless formats, and can be configured to transcode any of them to your own desired archival format using the very flexible command-line syntax.

    - M.

Edit: Added a few comments.
 

Joining APE files

Reply #2 –
Thanks for the advice, that tool was just what I was looking for!  If I'm feeling lazy I can always throw together a little PERL script to create the CUE sheets for me, it was the joining that I really wanted to automate since I didnt want to decompress / join / recompress manually.

And I'll definitely fire an e-mail off to the author and let him know how great his program is.