I thought I’d take the opportunity to share a Bash script I made to automate ripping music off CUE/BIN files. It splits BINs into separate files, so it’s 1 file per track, and strips pregap data, encodes audio tracks to FLAC or Ogg Vorbis, and it also generates new CUE sheets.
Link to the script:
https://github.com/linux4ever07/scripts/blob/main/cuebin_extract.sh
The idea came to me some years ago when I noticed that GOG packaged some of their games in a dumb way. It was specifically DOS games (bundled with DOSBox) that had CD audio. They would include the original BIN file, but with a modified CUE sheet that would not let you access the high quality CD audio. On top of that, they included Ogg Vorbis tracks, wasting HDD space for no reason by effectively storing the music twice, but only letting you access the lower quality Vorbis tracks. So, I thought, why not just split the BIN, encode the audio tracks to FLAC, and that way you both get better audio quality and also use less HDD space. DOSBox supports CUE sheets that list FLAC, Ogg Vorbis and even Opus tracks.
I took inspiration from ‘bchunk’, which is a program that does something similar. However, bchunk converts data tracks to ISO files, which is not what I wanted. I wanted to keep the original tracks completely untouched, so my script will copy data tracks as normal BIN files. bchunk also can’t encode audio tracks to FLAC or Ogg Vorbis, but it will produce uncompressed WAV files. And bchunk doesn’t produce new CUE sheets for the created files.
I also use the script to extract the OST from random games. I put together a playlist with some of my favorite retro video game music that I extracted using the script:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHI7ghR6XX4
There’s other uses for the script, such as splitting BINs in general. For example, many BeOS / ZETA disc images contain boot floppies as the first track, and once you split the BIN you can access the boot floppy image. And you can create frankenstein disc images by exchanging tracks between different disc images.
The script is made for Linux, but should work on macOS / FreeBSD as well if you have a recent version of Bash installed, as well as ffmpeg, flac and oggenc.
Thank you! I’m happy if more people besides just myself have use for it. It’s a niche some people might not be aware of. Especially for younger people who aren’t familiar with the CD format, and how music is stored in those games. It might help people get more direct access to the OST of their favorite retro games. Instead of having to search around the web for high quality audio, they can just extract it themselves.