CueSplit

Split single-file lossless albums into tagged tracks, on the Mac.

CueSplit opens a CD image rip (a cue sheet plus one FLAC, APE, WavPack, TTA, WAV or AIFF file for the whole album) and turns it into one tagged file per track: FLAC, Apple Lossless or AAC. Use the Mac app to check the names and tags, listen, and split, or cuesplit on the command line for scripts and batches.

Download

	Homebrew	Or download from Releases
CueSplit, the Mac app	brew install galaco/tap/cuesplit	CueSplit-<version>.dmg: open it and drag CueSplit to Applications
cuesplit, the command-line tool	brew install galaco/tap/cuesplit-cli	cuesplit-<version>-macos.zip: unzip it and put cuesplit on your PATH

Both are free, run on macOS 14 or later on Apple silicon and Intel Macs, and are signed and notarized by Apple. brew upgrade keeps Homebrew installs up to date; downloads from Releases don't update themselves. Homebrew also installs the command-line tool's man page (man cuesplit) and completions for zsh, bash and fish.

The app

• Any cue sheet: reads cue sheets in Unicode, Japanese (Shift-JIS, EUC-JP), Chinese (GB18030, Big5), Korean, Cyrillic and Western encodings, and detects which one a sheet uses. If names still look garbled, switch encodings and see the result straight away.
• Keeps your metadata: tags come from the cue sheet and the image file, including foobar2000-style per-track tags and the cover art.
• Edit before you split: change any tag for the whole album or the selected tracks, replace the cover art, and listen to any track.
• Checks its work: source files are checked against their MD5s, and every saved track is verified against the original audio.
• Add to Music: add the album, or a few tracks, to your Music library as Apple Lossless or AAC.

Drop a cue sheet on the window (or a FLAC, APE, WavPack or TTA file with an embedded cue sheet), check the track list, and click Split….

CueSplit Enthusiast

An optional one-time purchase that adds:

• Watched folders: add an album to a folder you choose, and CueSplit splits it, or adds it to Music, by itself.
• AI agents: agents such as Claude can open albums, fix tags and save tracks through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), only in folders you choose.
• The menu bar: CueSplit keeps running in the menu bar after you close its window, and can open at login.

Splitting stays free. Buy it in CueSplit > Settings > Enthusiast, which leads to galaco.me for copies from here and Homebrew.

The command-line tool

cuesplit album.cue                     # FLAC tracks in "Artist - Album" next to the cue sheet
cuesplit album.cue -o ~/Music --alac   # Apple Lossless, in ~/Music/Artist - Album
cuesplit */*.cue --aac -b 256          # several albums as 256 kbps AAC
cuesplit album.cue --tracks 3,5        # only some tracks
cuesplit album.cue --dry-run           # list the files it would save
cuesplit info album.cue                # show the tracks and tags without splitting

The input can also be a FLAC, APE, WavPack or TTA file with an embedded cue sheet.

Option
--flac, --alac, --aac	Output format. FLAC is the default; Apple Lossless and AAC are .m4a files that play in Music.
-b, --bitrate <kbps>	AAC bit rate: 128, 160, 192, 224, 256 (the default, Apple Music's) or 320.
-o, --output <folder>	Where to save. Defaults to each cue sheet's folder.
--no-album-folder	Save straight into the output folder instead of an "Artist - Album" folder.
--tracks <list>	Only these tracks, e.g. 3 or 1,4-6.
--overwrite	Replace existing files. Without it, cuesplit refuses to overwrite anything.
--encoding <name>	The cue sheet's text encoding, if the guess is wrong (cuesplit encodings lists them).
--gaps, --hidden-track	Where pregaps and audio before track 1 go.
--jobs <n>	Tracks to encode at once.

cuesplit help split lists every option.

In scripts

The paths of saved files go to standard output, one per line; progress and warnings go to standard error. -q hides progress.

--json prints the results instead:

{
  "albums" : [
    {
      "error" : null,
      "files" : [
        "/Music/Saltglass - Tidewater Hours/01 - First Light on the Estuary.flac",
        "/Music/Saltglass - Tidewater Hours/02 - Paper Boats.flac"
      ],
      "input" : "album.cue",
      "output" : "/Music/Saltglass - Tidewater Hours/",
      "warnings" : []
    }
  ]
}

Every field is always present: error is null for an album that succeeded, and output is null if cuesplit couldn't read the album.

cuesplit info album.cue --json describes the album: the encoding it detected, the source files, and every track with its start, length, file name and tags.

Exit status: 0 on success, 1 if any album failed (the others are still split), 64 for invalid arguments.

Feedback and support

Report bugs and ideas in Issues. For a cue sheet that CueSplit reads wrongly, please attach the .cue file. You can also email me.

Neither the app nor the command-line tool collects any data or connects to the internet; see the privacy policy.

License

Free to use and share unmodified; see LICENSE. Versions before 1.1 were released under the MIT License. CueSplit includes libFLAC and the Monkey's Audio SDK (both BSD-3-Clause), and the command-line tool also Swift Argument Parser (Apache 2.0). Their notices are in the app's About window and in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.txt in the command-line tool's download.