How to break up tracks when ripping CDs?

July 16, 2012 12:28 PM

CD Ripping - how to break tracks into smaller chunks? itunes or MediaMonkey. I recently got a copy of Stay Awake, a CD of new artists doing covers of old Disney songs, and I want to rip it to my computer. Several tracks are medleys - 3 or 4 songs running into each other as a single track. I know I can rip these individually, and then use a cutting program to make an individual copy of the songs, but is there an easier/automated way?

You can see more information on the album itself on its Wikipedia page.

I'd love to have a way to tell it something along the lines of:
"Take Track 1, which is 9:10 long and spit into:
Track 1 1:59 long
Track 2 3:32 long
Track 3 3:39 long"

I have MediaMonkey Gold (latest version as of a week ago) installed, and I also have itunes on the same laptop. I am running Win 7. I also have Ubuntu 10.10 on the same machine, but do not use it much.

I searched AskMeFi, and googled this, but I keep getting pages that explain how to change the sample rate, and other more basic changes.

I am not great with scripting, but if someone could point me to a script for MediaMonkey, I know how to cut, paste and execute it.

Any other tips, or advice would be appreciated.

Thank you!

posted by RevRob330 to Technology (14 answers total)

You can do this with Audacity, which is free
posted by thelonius at 12:40 PM on July 16, 2012

I have the same album...it's pretty weird....Sinead O'Conner singing Someday My Prince Will Come. I didn't bother to split apart the medleys.

It strikes me a sophisticated trick to recognize the changes of musical style between the individual songs. I'd just do it with Audacity, they're only a dozen or so songs across all the medleys so It doesn't strike me a terrible onerous task.

I could probably do it in about half a hour if you are really uncomfortable doing it yourself. Let me know....
posted by Confess, Fletch at 12:52 PM on July 16, 2012

Response by poster: Thelonius, thanks for the tip on Audacity. It's what I was thinking of when I mentioned cutting the tracks down individually.

What I am trying to ask, and I may not have phrased it clearly enough, is there a way to set this up at the first rip from CD? Is there a way to automate it? (If there is one in Audacity, can you tell me how, or point me towards directions to do that?)

Thanks again.
posted by RevRob330 at 12:52 PM on July 16, 2012

CDWav is free and excellent for this. It makes it easy to cut tracks and keep them in order, audibly and visually. Its special feature is keeping all splits right on a CD frame boundary, so if you burn the tracks to CD without gaps between tracks, there is no audible gap when tracks change. Other cutting methods do not necessarily cut on a CD frame boundary.

I don't think there is any way to fully automate splitting medley tracks. CDWav can makes its splits based on an input CUE file, but you would have to develop that list manually, similar to your example. You can do that in the program.
posted by caclwmr4 at 12:58 PM on July 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

Audacity has a feature called 'Labels' that supposedly simplifies splitting an exiting track into multiple tracks. But it still needs you to specify the spots to split things.

I've messed around with LP Ripper that attempts to automatically detect song changes, it's doesn't work very well. it relies on there being a gap between songs.
posted by Confess, Fletch at 1:05 PM on July 16, 2012

EAC supports index-based ripping to separate tracks (Copy Selected Tracks Index-Based) but for that to work the CD in question needs to contain the correct index information, otherwise it's of no use to you.
posted by Bangaioh at 2:02 PM on July 16, 2012

That's a good album... I particularly enjoy Sun Ra's Arkestra doing Pink Elephants on Parade. Oh, and the Buster Poindexter cut. A riot!
posted by Guy_Inamonkeysuit at 2:29 PM on July 16, 2012

That CD was originally released with index numbers for the separate pieces of the Medleys, but I haven't seen a CD player that recognizes that since, oh, about the time it was originally released. I'm not even sure if current pressings still contain the data.
posted by pupdog at 3:46 PM on July 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Some great suggestions all. I take a look in the next few days. I appreciate it!
posted by RevRob330 at 7:09 PM on July 16, 2012

I just looked at my copy of Stay Awake and it's the original 1988 release. It does not have index tracks. It's possible that newer versions do have index tracks.

I just tried the index based ripping that Bangaioh suggested on my only disc with indexes and that does work.
posted by Confess, Fletch at 7:08 PM on July 17, 2012

Confess, Fletch - that's wild! I bought mine in 88 or 89 and thought it was so awesome that all the indexes showed up on our CD player, and the track listings even had the smaller index numbers broken up. We need to go back in time and figure this out.
posted by pupdog at 6:52 AM on July 18, 2012

Interesting....according to All Music there was a 1990 release of the album, I wonder if that's what you had.

I too had a CD player that allowed you to see and choose index tracks and it worked on the one CD that I own with index tracks.

Also my one disc explicitly calls out the index tracks and Stay Awake doesn't. Did your copy call them out on the liner notes?
posted by Confess, Fletch at 9:25 AM on July 18, 2012

This seems to be a good way of doing this in Audacity. Do Analyze > Silence Finder and then File > Export Multiple, perhaps? Oooh, I have this CD, I'm going to put Tom Waits' Heigh-Ho on a compilation now (or when work ends...)!
posted by nimmpau at 12:02 PM on July 18, 2012

Response by poster: Thanks again all.

I used Audacity to manually cut the individual tracks down to size. Took a while (not the easiest program) but worked just fine.

--Rob
posted by RevRob330 at 9:02 AM on August 23, 2012