As described before, I started ripping some audio from DVD’s. Of course I started listening to my new collection and was a little bit disappointed with the result of one of my self made concert recordings. Nearly all the MP3’s seem to start too late. Some research and I was not the only one having that problem with transcode. But in my case it was more a bad authoring. Whoever created that DVD cut the tracks really, really badly.
Luckily I also ripped the whole audio of each disc so just had to split this file correctly. I remembered a tool called mp3cue but it was not easy to find in the Ubuntu repository. It is part of package poc-streamer
aptitude install poc-streamer
mp3cue uses a cue file. The problem was to find the exact time stamps for the cuts. My first try was audacity which is a great tool, but in that case it was hard to see where the tracks start/end. So I had to do check the DVD. I tried some tools but mplayer still seems to be the best option. It provides a reasonable stepping for fast forward or rewind inside the movie. With that data I could create the cue file.
PERFORMER "Five4Brass"
TITLE "Live"
FILE "five4brass.mp3" MP3
TRACK 01 AUDIO
TITLE "Introduction"
PERFORMER "Five4Brass"
INDEX 01 00:00:00
TRACK 02 AUDIO
TITLE "Choral"
PERFORMER "Five4Brass"
INDEX 01 06:42:00
...
Now comes the fun part. Splitting MP3’s.
mp3cue -c sheet.cue input.mp3
Finally I have my DVD converted into MP3’s, or not? Well, I am not done yet. The cue file does not have all the information to fill all id3 tags. The genre and the release date needs a manual update.
Now it’s done…
Keep on hackin’…