MakeMP3 is Copyright 2015-2017 by Andrew Paul Landells.
MakeMP3 is a cross-platform Perl script for batch-processing lossless CD rips with cue sheets into MP3 files. It uses ffmpeg and lame, and optionally aacgain, to build an MP3 library with correct metadata.
MakeMP3 takes one or more cue sheets on the command line and parses them to create ffmpeg and lame command lines to produce MP3s. It works with full-disc images or track-by-track rips. The audio can be either WAV or any other lossless codec supported by ffmpeg including FLAC and WavPack.
The metadata of the output MP3 files is always based on the cue sheet; any metadata in the audio files is ignored. Please see the section on metadata further down for more details as to what metadata MakeMP3 supports.
MakeMP3 [--ag] [--tg] [--debug] [--dry-run] source_file ...Basic usage is very simple: list your cue sheet(s) on the command line and MakeMP3 will process them all and place the resulting MP3 library in a new directory called 'makemp3', created in the working directory. MP3s are encoded by default with the lame encoder options '--preset extreme -k'
The command-line options work as follows: --ag Apply album gain using aacgain. This estimates the average perceived loudness of the entire album and applies a lossless gain change to approximately match it to a reference of 89dB sound pressure level.
For more specifics about adjusting gain, how it works, and why
you might want to do this, you should look into 'mp3gain'.
--tg Apply track gain using aacgain. This estimates the average
perceived loudness of each track individually and applies a
lossless gain chainge to approximately match it to a reference
of 89dB sound pressure level.
--debug Prints out lots of debugging information, which is mostly useful
for development purposes, but can also be helpful to work out
why your cue sheets aren't generating the output you expect.
--dry-run Performs a dry run for checking that your cue sheets are
well-formed and can be parsed by MakeMP3. Combining --debug and
--dry-run is a good way to test what MakeMP3 will do before you
commit to running a large encoding job.The cue-sheet file format originated in CDRWIN as a way of representing the structure of an audio CD or CD-ROM independently of the data itself. The format encapsulates both the important track information from an audio CD's table of contents (TOC) and certain subcode-embedded metadata such as index marks and CD-Text.
Many current CD-ripping tools support generation of cue sheets alongside the extracted audio data; the most prominent example is Exact Audio Copy (EAC) for Windows. Under OSX, X Lossless Decoder (XLD) is a good choice. Under Linux, cue sheets can be generated using cdrdao and cuetools, most likely paired with cdparanoia to extract the actual audio data.
A cue sheet will usually look something like this:
TITLE "My First Album" PERFORMER "The Musical Artists" REM DATE 2000 REM GENRE "Pop" FILE "CDImage.wv" WAVE TRACK 01 AUDIO TITLE "The first track" INDEX 00 00:00:00 INDEX 01 00:00:30 TRACK 02 AUDIO TITLE "The second track" INDEX 00 05:23:42 INDEX 01 05:23:47
If you use EAC to rip track-by-track with pregaps, you will generate what's known as an EAC "non-compliant" cue sheet. As of MakeMP3 1.2.1, this is now a supported cue sheet format. Such a cue sheet will look something like this:
TITLE "My First Album" PERFORMER "The Musical Artists" REM DATE 2000 REM GENRE "Pop" FILE "Track 01.wv" WAVE TRACK 01 AUDIO TITLE "The first track" INDEX 00 00:00:00 INDEX 01 00:00:30 TRACK 02 AUDIO TITLE "The second track" INDEX 00 05:23:42 FILE "Track 02.wv" WAVE INDEX 01 00:00:00
MakeMP3 uses many of these cue-sheet directives to provide metadata for the output MP3 files. As the cue-sheet format is relatively limited, some standard comment types are also used by MakeMP3; supported cue-sheet fields are listed below. Note that some fields can appear at either the top level, the track level, or both. For most metadata fields, MakeMP3 will search at the track level, and, if not found, will fall back to the corresponding top-level entry (if present).
TITLE Specifies the "song name" field if defined at the track level Specifies the "album" field if defined at the top level If a track-level definition isn't found, MakeMP3 will use the top-level definition (if any) for both "song name" and "album"
PERFORMER Specifies the "artist" field if defined at the track level Specifies the "album artist" field if defined at the top level If a track-level definition isn't found, MakeMP3 will use the top-level definition (if any) for both "artist" and "album artist"
SONGWRITER Specifies the "composer" field
REM ARTWORK Relative path to an image to be inserted as the embedded album artwork
REM COMMENT Specifies the "comment" field
REM DATE Specifies the "year" field
REM GENRE Specifies the "genre" field
REM DISCNUMBER Sets the disc number of a set; defaults to '1' if unspecified
REM TOTALDISCS Sets the total number of discs in the set; defaults to the same value as DISCNUMBER if unspecified
REM COMPILATION TRUE Sets the "Part of a compilation" flag. Strictly speaking, this should be considered to be a "various artists" flag, rather than the strict definition of a "compilation" album. You don't want to set it if there is a defined album artist.
REM SKIP TRUE Causes MakeMP3 to completely skip a track. Useful if you only want to encode a subset of the tracks. Particularly useful for albums with hidden tracks at the end, preceded by lots of silence. If this directive is put at the top level of the cue sheet, the entire album is skipped. If you set this flag at the top level, it can be overridden on a track-by-track basis with the inverse, REM SKIP FALSE
TRACK nn AUDIO The TRACK directive is mandatory for each track of a cue sheet; MakeMP3 also uses it to set the track-number tag. The total number of tracks is set to the highest track number declared in the cue sheet.
INDEX nn mm:ss:ff INDEX directives are used to declare timestamps in the cue sheet. They are of the form mm:ss:ff -- minutes, seconds and frames. A frame is defined as 1/75th of a second. The cue sheet format (but not MakeMP3 itself) mandates that every track have an INDEX 01 directive for its start; others are optional, including INDEX 00, which represents the start of the track's pregap, if any. Indexes 02 onward are typically used for marking subsections (e.g. movements). Although the cue-sheet format does not explicitly support fractional and out-of-range values in timestamp fields, MakeMP3 will process these correctly, making e.g. 99.5:66:108.3 correspond to 100:37:33.3.
MakeMP3 currently only uses INDEX 01 values. A track is encoded from its
INDEX 01 to the INDEX 01 of the following track (if present). If MakeMP3
cannot find a track's start or end time in the cue sheet, the current audio
file's start or end is used instead.REM END mm:ss:ff REM END directives are timestamps, formatted the same as INDEX markers. If you specify an END timestamp in a track declaration, that timestamp is used to end the track, instead of the INDEX 01 of the subsequent track.
MakeMP3 was originally written to fulfil a specific need, so it's currently fairly limited in many regards and isn't tremendously configurable.
ffmpeg, lame (and aacgain if using --ag or --tg) must be on your path for MakeMP3 to work.
lame and aacgain settings are hard-coded into MakeMP3. These should be user-customisable, ideally in a separate configuration file.
The encoder should be decoupled from MakeMP3 so that something other than lame can be used instead. Ideally, this will involve an abstract templating scheme much like EAC's so that any encoder can be easily supported.
The metadata implementation is incomplete, for example ISRC tags are not created. It would also be nice to support pre-emphasis correctly.
v1.2.1
v1.2.0
v1.1.0
v1.0.0
If you have any feedback, bug reports or feature requests, you can email the author at andy@soton.ac.uk -- I can't make any promises about what further development or features will go into MakeMP3, but I'm certainly willing to consider suggestions. Please feel free to submit patches or pull requests. MakeMP3 is distributed as Free Software in the hopes that it will be useful to other people. If you find it useful and wish to make a donation, you can do so via PayPal using the e-mail address listed above.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".
MakeMP3 is Copyright 2015-2017 Andrew Paul Landells
MakeMP3 is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.