RTFM - How to split audio wave file

Few years ago (4 or 5 I think) when I was downloading music in a hope of a higher quality the content was delivered in a 3 files, flac, cue and log. The flac file contains whole CD or album, cue is to describe where/when each song starts, ends, its name and author etc and log is a log from the program which made it.

This is all nice and great if you are using some more complicated music player with library function which can create index of the songs contained in such files and play them accordingly from its UI. But as a believer that GUI is bloated I am using Music on Console player which does not have this function and is strictly reading files (so I think). So I needed to split this huge file and extract each song with correct tags.

So I searched internet and even written a script to automate this (a monster to say). I was too lazy and did not check manual at all just copy pasted commands from different places and glued it together. To a script which first created WAV files and than converted it to FLAC with tags. This conversion took a long time while my machine was under a huge load, truly a waste. But I was happy that it works.

Now a smarter me read a manual and found out that the utility which is used to split the wave (flac) file shntool has an option to configure the output format which works flawlessly and is very fast. It does not include tags though, and as I am writing this channel I found a very good article on Arch Wiki which describes exactly what I wish to do.

So instead of boasting how good I am at scripting and messing around as I originally intended I ended up learning to revise my old scripts after reading the manual and reading wiki. What a night.

EDIT: After being happy for a while I ran into a wall which consist of shntool being unable to process big files. So I did another bit of research and found utility unflac which is able to do the job a bit better. The code can be found here.

Articles from blogs I follow:

“We should be more ambitious with the software we build”

Since early this year, Michael Malis (of pgrust) has been showing me interesting things he's done and saying [W]e should be more ambitious1 with the software we build There is, understandably, a lot of skepticism about projects like pgrust because there…

via danluu.com October 24, 2026

With "AI" coding the future of software development looks more grim than ever before!

This is not just a rant, this is a serious call and warning to every company or project developing software.

via Unix Digest - Articles October 20, 2026

GPG Update 2026

A recent toot of mine got the response “friends don’t let friends use GPG” which, I suppose, is true enough. It certainly isn’t the attestation-friendly thing to use, and the opsec failures that are so easy with GPG-encrypted mail make it a hazard there. …

via [bobulate] February 3, 2026

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