Best program to cut Flac files similar to MP3 Direct Cut?

2019-03-20 18:52:51

Hello.

I am looking for a program with that I can cut Flac tracks in a similar way like MP3 Direct Cut does with MP3 files.

I found a way in Audacity to do this but is this completely lossless? I am not sure whether the whole Flac track is re-encoded. I would like to avoid that so I have no quality loss at all.

Thanks.

Re: Best program to cut Flac files similar to MP3 Direct Cut?

Reply #1 – 2019-03-20 19:03:55

Direct cutting programs impose restrictions on the granularity of cuts and the visualization and zoom options are poor. For lossless files you don't need to suffer any of that. Decompress in an editor of your choice and cut.

You may need to disable Dither in the editor, if it expands the wordlength upon opening or cut operations, which I believe Audacity does. To verify that the inputs and outputs are the same, perform a null test by subtracting, and zooming in on the difference. Doing it on the first track is easy and probably sufficient.

My choice of cutting is with regions either in Reaper (also need to disable dither during rendering, and automatic clip fades) or in and old version of Sound Forge. But any good editor will do.

Another option is CDWave. It cannot perform any edit operations other than cutting, so you can't do them accidentally.

Re: Best program to cut Flac files similar to MP3 Direct Cut?

Reply #2 – 2019-03-20 19:46:23

If opening, editing, and exporting back to the same resolution, turn dither off in Audacity:

Edit > Preferences > Quality > High-quality Conversion > None

More info: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/quality_preferences.html

If you want to be sure your cut point is on a CD frame boundary, turn on "Snap To" before editing the file.

Re: Best program to cut Flac files similar to MP3 Direct Cut?

Reply #3 – 2019-03-20 23:40:06

ffmpeg with -t or -to does it down to the single samples, or do I remember wrong?

And, concerning CD frame boundaries: what happens if you handtype a cuesheet and let your fave application convert to tracks? Will they take for granted that cuesheets imply CDDA frame granularity? Which will and which won't?

Re: Best program to cut Flac files similar to MP3 Direct Cut?

Reply #4 – 2019-03-21 03:14:15

You can hand type a cue sheet and convert with Foobar, but it is a somewhat tedious process: have a visual editor open and copy the timecodes from it with mouse for every track. If the frame separator is a full stop, type a colon by hand, maybe overwrite a digit by mistake.

Re: Best program to cut Flac files similar to MP3 Direct Cut?

Reply #5 – 2019-03-22 04:23:23

FLAC is lossless so you can go through an infinite number of compression-decompression cycles with not alteration of the data.

But as j7n says, if you use Audacity you'll have to turn-off dither.