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Digitizing my record collection: Splitting up files

I hope this is okay for me to post in here. It's about music :)

So I'm currently digitizing my records. This is easy to do for CDs. I got myself a dvd drive and just rip them to flac files on my computer. Tagging is easy too pulling the data from music brainz. Vinyl records are a little bit of a different story though because for each side of a record I get one long audio file. Splitting up the files to individual tracks is a very tedious process. I'm currently doing that manually with audacity and then exporting them to flac files.

Does anyone have an idea to do that more easily? Maybe even automate parts of the process. After all music brainz has all the track lenghts available. So in theory it should be possible to automate this to some degree.

Any ideas are welcome. Thank you.

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13 comments

  • MusicBrainz won't help, because every rip will have enough variance to thwart digital identification. Also, the song lengths will be off because your beginning and end times will differ from CD rips, and this will compound until you're significantly off course by the end. I'll be happy if someone posts a better method, but I'm still using Audacity and setting manual track labels.

  • Splitting a recording into separate tracks - Audacity Manual Super easy to do. Back in the Cool Edit days I digitized hundreds of LPs by hand, it is a bit of a chore.

  • Technically - doable.

    As someone who's never had a vinyl - this would be my angle of attack:

    • Slice the first 10 (or however many are necessary) seconds of the track
    • Hit some Shazam or Google API with the slice
    • Get the title
    • Hit Music Brainz API (or some other) to get the legth of the track
    • Cut the single track into title+remainder
    • Rinse and repeat.

    ffmpeg could deal with cutting the file

    cUrl can hit the APIs

    some shell script (bash would be my choice) would tie it all together

    • The problem with this is that you would have to be dead on with the spin speed on record player. It should be 33-1/3, but I've had ones I've had to adjust for being too fast or slow, and it can be difficult to tell the difference between slightly fast or short. This usually isn't a huge problem if the difference is too small to be notable, but the few seconds added or removed per side might be enough to throw it off.

      That said, you're going to want the speed to be right, anyway, and the few seconds of silence between tracks ought to give you some leeway. I'd say it would work, but speed is something to keep in mind.

  • I recommend using the free program called CD Wave.

    http://www.milosoftware.com/en/index.php?body=cdwave.php

  • @honk I suspect that may be pushing the bounds of what may be currently doable with Audacity unless you explore the realms of plugins or create your own, possibly worth reaching out to the developers of audacity over at GitHub? (Certainly not a "quick" thing to develop unless someone happens to be working on this already)
    Only other thing I can think of may be to explore other software options such as Vinyl studio or Pure vinyl. Probably not free and whether actually worth it is debatable.
    Only other option I can think of is to ask a third party (or parties) to do the work on your behalf - again likely not cheap unless you have some really good friends 😁
    Of course the purists might argue that you are moving away from the sense of the original recording (one long track) but I can wholly appropriate why you want to do it. I do feel your pain though, just sorry I don't have any easier answers 😕

  • @honk Do you also have cue files created/can you create them? If yes, you can use something like Flacon on Linux or CUETools on Windows.

    • what would be the best method of getting cue files though. Because just creating them myself by hand would be just as tedious as just splitting the files myself.

  • @honk Haven't tried myself but maybe scope to use a "label" track and export multiple? manual.audacityteam.org/man/ex…
    You may have some degree of success in auto labelling depending on the audio and threshold levels bytefreaks.net/applications/au…

    • Labeling the parts of the song and then exporting multiple is how I currently do it.

      The auto labelling actually somewhat works. The error rate is relatively high though. Set the threshold too low and the background noise of the record will make it detect nothing. Setting it too high and even small quieter parts get detected. It's far from being "automated" but it actually helps a bit. Thank you.

13 comments