How-to abcde from an audio CD image

abcde is a command line CD encoder.  It rips CDs and encodes it in MP3, OGG or other formats.

By default it reads from your CD drive.  If you only have an image of your CD you are out of luck. You can either first burn the image on let abcde work on the CD, or use the only other format abcde currently accepts as input: a flac file with embedded cue sheet.

There are two common images files for audio CDs: cue/bin and toc/bin

The bin file contains the digital representation of the audio, whereas the remaining file describes where the tracks start and end.

cue/bin

You can create the flac file from cue/bin files using the following command:

flac --best --force-raw --sample-rate=44100 --channels=2 --bps=16 --endian=big --sign=signed --cuesheet=image.cue image.bin -o image.flac

Check the compression ratio after flac has finished.  A ratio of approx. 0.99 usually indicates that the byte order is reversed.  This may happen if the image was created on a Mac. If you play back the flac file, you will hear mostly noise. In this case change the byte order to

--endian=little

Normal compression ratios are in the range of 0.6 to 0.7.

You can then convert the flac file to single tagged MP3 files using:

abcde -d image.flac

toc/bin

flac can't process TOC files. You have to convert them into the CUE format. Fortunately there is an app for that: cueconvert from the cuetools package:

cueconvert image.toc image.cue

I had to find out that cueconvert will abort with a syntax error when I used toc files created by Brasero.

In this case load the toc file into a text editor and remove the CD_TEXT { … } block, if present.

And while you're at it, delete all lines containing ISRC codes, as flac does not like these.

After the conversion use the resulting CUE file as described earlier.