XLD - A Quick Review
Wed May 16, 2007 · 170 words

I ran into a situation where I had a music CD as a single FLAC file with the tracks defined in a cuesheet. The generally-fabulous Max wouldn't do anything with this combo (it opened the .cue file, but that was it). The command-line FLAC decoder does support cue indexes, but just as I was getting ready for some shellscript/Automator mumbo jumbo, I decided to pull a Google search for “flac cue os x” and that's when I stumbled on this wonderful little utility called XLD.

Very straight-forward stuff. It cracked open the cue sheet and bam:

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Even though it's name suggests XLD only deals with lossless files, it also supports a number of lossy formats. And ofcourse you get to tweak all the necessary parameters, including all the stuff you're used to in iTunes (thanks to Core Audio).

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Wonderful stuff. It doesn't get much better than this - something that does exactly what it's designed for and does it well. Wait, it does - there's also a commandline version! ;-)


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