Kedr: a SACD ISO to FLAC app, written in Cursor
I wanted a Mac utility that takes a Super Audio CD image and turns it into FLAC. Opening the ISO in ffmpeg does not work. The disc is not PCM. It is one-bit DSD, often still packed as DST. What came out of that is here . The window is Electron. A local Python process does the conversion. The album never leaves the machine. Here is the part I am not going to dress up. I did not type this project…
Kedr is an app written in Cursor for converting Super Audio CD images to FLAC format on a Mac. It handles one-bit DSD audio, which is often stored as DST. The app is developed using vibe coding, allowing for quick iteration and adjustments based on real disc tests. The development process involved making several requests, starting with just a macOS utility for DSD ISO to FLAC conversion, and gradually adding MP3 support, window improvement, language options, and a Windows build script.
The app uses sacd_extract from sacd-ripper to extract audio tracks from SACD images, which is licensed under GPL-2.0. FLAC and MP3 output formats are stored as PCM, and Kedr maintains the tags from the original disc. Conversion to MP3 is done with LAME at 320 kbps, 44.1 kHz, and a 20 kHz lowpass filter. Kedr supports Russian and English languages, with the system language as the default.
Despite the app's capabilities, there are limitations. FLAC and MP3 can't preserve the exact bit-perfect SACD, as they only support PCM, so the output may not be an exact replica of the original disc. Additionally, Kedr cannot handle multichannel areas if the output format is MP3, as MPEG does not support it. Temporary DSF files are deleted after successful track conversion, and any errors encountered during the process are logged for review.
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