just saw this in the foobar2000 forum referencing release 0.7.4beta:

<Case> and foo_ape supports internal cuesheets
<Case> put whole contents of cuesheet in 'cuesheet' field and re-add image file to playlist and you'll see separate tracks

it works!!! finally an album in a single file with proper tagging. it seems that when you input the cuesheet text into CUESHEET tag of the ape file, foobar2000 parses the correct song titles and adds them to their corresponding individual tracks.

i have been holding off ripping my collection (4000+ cd's) until finding an elegant single file lossless solution. flac almost got it, but not being able to have song names in the cuesheet killed it for me. looks like this might be the solution!

now i am trying to find an elegant way of bulk ripping and tagging.

my starting point is to use eac's "copy image and create cuesheet - compressed" (with monkey's). this obviously returns two files - xxx.ape and xxx.ape.cue, with the xxx.ape.cue containing the song title info. so far so good. i realize that i could do the rest of the tagging process in foobar2000, but it would get a bit tedious, having to manually copy and paste the contents of the cuesheet for every album.

my question is as follows:

would it be possible to use case's tag program (or any other solution) to automatically:

1. embed cuesheet test into CUESHEET tag of .ape file
2. replaygain the album (optional)
3. rename the .ape file to something like ARTIST-ALBUM.ape based on the tags

this would make it so much easier to bulk rip my collection.

thanks,

brett

This is the best news since sliced toast (and as you may know, before the invention of sliced toast, you had to toast a whole loaf at a time).

I am also looking forward to an elegant single-step way to do this.

Replaygain the .cue as you open it in foobar, then insert it, along with a .log if you want to.
I've made a tool to help me with this after EAC is finished. The only thing I'd like now is a T&C mode for this method along with formatting based filenames as with regular extractionmodes.

Umm I was wondering, can't you use APL files instead and tag & replaygain them? It seems to be more consistent to me.

however it was done for APE could be done for FLAC too. it might just be the same thing that is already implemented in foo_flac (storing CDDB records as metadata).

Josh

I am curious to know why you want a single file. Personally, I love being able to let friends online listen to an individual song from an album. I would guess you want the album to play exactly as it does in a CD player, but I thought Foobar already did this. I could also imagine this is for your own file management's sake.

So, why is it you want a single file?

It's very simple: whole cuesheet with all the metadata in it is stored in single tag field. This is then parsed on load and separate tracks are shown in playlist. Yes, it could be done in FLAC too but since it uses its own method I don't think it would be welcome hack there.

For convenience I'd imagine. Some people like it that they only need to worry about one file when dealing with albums. Renaming, moving, copying and organizing is easy.


Nothing stops you from extracting any track from the image file.

or playing each separate track inside of it from a DB (such as with foobar)

This is trivial and unimportant to most people, but foobar does not support cd Indexes (yet ).

Feature Request: CD index support
Pre-gaps ripped in EAC?
Pregap - should time be in tag?

I always thought the whole purpose of using cuesheets to preserve the gap information was to be able to create a bit identical copy of the original cd in the future. I have been trying to do this using the internal ape cuesheets but am unable to get the copied cd bit identical to the original.

Can anyone else try creating a bit identical copy of an original cd!

Thanks

Nothing difficult in that if you use EAC to rip and burn and use proper offset correction.

back to my original post, any ideas?

brett

1 - yes
2 - possibly if a commandline function was implemented in foobar
3 - perhaps, but I do that part manually now hence I get:
%ALBUM%.log
%ARTIST%-%YEAR%-%CDtype%.%ALBUM%.ape
%ARTIST%-%YEAR%-%CDtype%.%ALBUM%.cue

I could submit a small too that I made at some stage which inserts .cue & .log.

Sorry, didnt make myself very clear. I meant, creating bit identical copies after using ape with internal cuesheets

I dont think this can be done can it

If not, I think it kind of defeats the objective doesnt it ???

uhm... you still have a cuesheet don't you?
how about extracting it to a .cue file which you load?

My post was reply to your question. There is nothing difficult if you just use the same cue and offset corrected EAC to burn. I haven't tried burning directly from APEs though as I always decode to WAV first.

Never seen so much quoting - so I'll jump in the boat


I would love a tool for that - nice little GUI - maybe a HA icon on the desktop for it?
You say you do manually the name change - in the command prompt?
I need to catch up on the apev2 tagging system but where can we see if an ape file would have an embedded cue or log file?

Finally got it working. Can now create bit identical cds after being compressed to ape+cuesheet !!!

Someone want to explain to me how to embed the cue & log file.
Haven't had the morning coffee so brain is very slow

use masstagger to create a tag called CUESHEET and paste the contents of the cuesheet in it.

hint - if you replaygain the cuesheet first, the replaygain info is written to cuesheet and also gets embedded into the file.

brett

@ TwoJ - its as simple as schnittlich explains.

For some reason it will not accept the "COMMENT" tag? I tried it before creating the CUESHEET tag and after creating the CUESHEET tag, but it doesn't want to know ???

I disabled tag writing for other fields but 'cuesheet' when operating in this cuesheet mode but new version allows writing all other fields but 'tracknumber' and 'title'.

Is there any way of writing track specific tags (to the actual file, not just in the database)? For example, I might want to write different dates to each track in a greatest hits album.

Writing to the date tag of a single track creates that tag in the .ape file, so as I would expect if I then reload info from files for all the tracks that date is shown against every track. I tried creating extra lines against the tracks in the cue sheet before importing it, much in the same way as the replaygain lines are added. For example:

REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAIN -4.59 dB
REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_PEAK 0.929016
REM DATE 1994

But this last line does not seem to be recognised when storing the cue sheet in the CUESHEET tag.

i have a question for case...

is there some way to automate the tagging process using your tag tool instead of inside foobar? the number of steps it takes in foobar make it VERY time consuming to process a large collection.

brett

Not for anything that cue sheet doesn't support. I don't like the idea of abusing remarks for other info than absolutely necessary ReplayGain.

Not without creating complex scripts.

Thanks, it seems to have fixed the the problem

is there a trick to getting masstagger->rename files to work after embedding the cuesheet? i am trying to rename the .ape file to ARTIST-ALBUM.ape based on the new tags. that way, when using EAC to copy image and create cuesheet, i do not have to worry about properly naming the files maually, and therefore remove a step in the process.

brett

Argh...I hope somebody can help me out. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, but I haven't been able to figure it out yet. I'm using EAC to extract an image and cuesheet and I am compressing it with MAC. I'm then using foobar2000 to Replaygain the CUE and using Masstagger to put the CUE in the APE file. Easy so far...but how do I extract the CUE if I want to burn this album using EAC?

Also, is there some easier (read: automated) way of doing this that I'm not aware of?

Easy enough: copy/paste the contents from the CUESHEET tag in Notepad, and save as a .cue file.

I'm not confused about that...how do I VIEW the cuesheet tag in the APE file?

Doubleclick the cuesheet tag.

I don't see a CUESHEET tag. Here's what I'm doing.

1) Run foobar2000
2) Playlist|Add files|Select APE
3) Right-click a track|Masstagger|Edit tags

Should I be doing this some other way? I don't see any tags for my APE when doing this.

Anyone? I tried using Cases Tag to save the tags to a file, but it didn't handle the CRs or LFs correctly and I ended up with one long line in a file instead of a proper cuesheet that EAC could read.

Okay...it's not elegant, but it works. I was using the --tofilen option with Tag when I could have just emitted it and copy and pasted the output.

Do a rightclick on file -> show file info, then doubleclick the cue-sheet tag. (You can also put the cue-sheet in the tag there)

If you can't see the cue-sheet tag do a right-click -> database -> reload info from file(s)

Ah...perfect. Thanks!

I apologise for resurrecting an old thread, but it seems to me the most appropriate place to raise this.

Case, would you please consider adding the cuesheet in a tag functionality for flac within foobar2000. I note that your reason for not doing so before was so as not to hack a new method where Josh had already created a flac standard for storing cue sheets.


However, Josh has now stated in this thread that he is happy for you to do this:



Thanks.

Edit: oops... I mistakenly thought this thread was in the foobar2000 forum. Intended to raise this issue there. Sorry.