If I rip my albums to a single wav-file with EAC and use flac.exe to encode to flac automatic, from "within" EAC, can I still tag each track individually? Or do I have to tag them from foobar?

Or isn't it possible to tag separate tracks at all, when the album is ripped to a single file?

I don't think you can tag all tracks in a single-file, but as you use cue (I read your other post), track number, track name, album title and artist will be present there.

So, when you transcode from that single FLAC-file to several MP3s, you can get foobar to tag the mp3s with that info.

Genre and year will be left out I guess.

If I tag an album (single flac file w. cue sheet) with Genre and Date from foobar2000, where is that information stored? In foobar's database, in the flac or in the cue sheet?

One way to do this is to put each song as a new track into a MKA file, but fb2k does not see them as separate songs in the playlist yet AFAIK ....

You can import an album encoded as a single file into Matroska along with its CUE and tag each song independantly. Then the data is stored in the file, and not just fb2k's database. However, there are currently issues with the current tools for seeking to exact samples. So you may want to wait. But it is worth a shot to see how well it works for you.

I'm using a single flac w/ embedded cuesheet for mostly archival purposes at the moment, and split into individual files for the player to deal with.

Embedding the cuesheet into flac file loses any CD-TEXT that it may have (which is where tag info is often placed in a cuesheet, even if there's not actualy CD-TEXT on the original cd.) I'm hoping that when the players gain the ability to really deal with a album-as-file flac, they'll also figure out the best way to deal with tagging the individual songs. (doing a cddb lookup at playback time is not always possible.)

Until that time, I only have to worry about preserving the info for archival uses. To that end, I simply take advantage of the fact that you can have more than one flac tag with the same descriptor (and it preserves their order). So I end up with an archived cd file with tags along the lines of this...

ARTIST=Really Cool Band
ALBUM=Debut
DATE=2004
TITLE=First Cool Song
TITLE=Another Cool Song
TITLE=Even Beter Track
TITLE=Disappointing Finale

Of course my player doesn't know what to do with that yet, but it'll preserve the info until the previously mentioned player improvements actually exist.
It also means that I'm tagging either by hand, or with scripts that I've written and not the shiney new tagger program of the week, but it works well enough as a temporary solution until someone comes up with a real standard to deal with this. (metaflac --import-vc-from=filename.txt comes in really handy here.)

Anyway, that's my two cents.

why?

Because importing cue-sheet in flac doesn't mean that it is stored as metadata (as in case of Monkey's Audio). Only the cue-points are imported.

why to which?

why is there rarely any actualy CD-TEXT on a disc? probably because there is no hardware "cd player" on the market (that I'm aware of) which actually supports this feature.

why is the tag info placed as CD-TEXT in a cue sheet? probably because there is little chance of actual CD-TEXT existing on the disc. And the cue sheet format is designed for cd burning purposes, so it's mostly a table of contents for the disc. That is, track 5 starts here and track 7 starts there, sort of information. There is no inherrent place in this for the sort of information you'd place in a metatag, but the mostly unused CD-TEXT ability makes for a (relatively) easy place to store this information.

why does flac not support CD-TEXT in it's embedded cuesheets when they store all the relevent information for recreating the original cd? well, there apparently has been some debate about this topic, but most of the results can be summarized by the comments here...
http://flac.sourceforge.net/faq.html#gener...o_cuesheet_tags
yes, this means that a cd with actual embedded CD-TEXT would lose it's CD-TEXT if burned from an archival copy that only consists of a flac with an embedded cuesheet. But the likely hood of actual CD-TEXT on an original (mass produced) cd is low enough that this is almost irrelevent.

why doesn't flac convert the metadata from the cuesheet into tag metadata? well, first of all, xiph (and therefore flac) has decided not to specify metadata, so as not to piss anyone off. Instead they pass the buck in hopes of third-party consensus of what the metadata should look like. To some degree this has happend for individual tracks (ARTIST, ALBUM, TITLE, TRACKNUMBER, etc.) but the concept of a single flac file representing an entire cd with an embedded cuesheet is still fairly new. No third-party consensus has yet emerged on how to handle metadata for these types of archives. More importantly, no one has written code to support this not-yet-determined format for multi-tracks-in-a-single-file metadata. It's been pointed out that with the embedded cuesheet you have the information necessary to query cddb/freedb/musicbrainz/etc. which is probably adequate for archiving and backup. Once more players start to have support for treating cd-in-one-flac as a collection of seperate tracks, maybe we'll start to see a standard emerge for how to tag them appropriately.

For what it's worth, I've taken to tagging my cd archives directly with the relevent information. That is, since flac tags allow more than one tag with the same descriptor, I just use multiple TITLE tags to list the song titles in the order they appear on the cd. Hopefully, once a real standard emerges it'll be easy to transform these existing tags into that standard's format.

There are some car cd players that support cd text. Also some sony home players. Do not ask me for model #'s, I don't know

Matroska has every commonly used tag predefined, also allowing you to store other non-standard tags. It allows you to attach the CUE file itself, should you desire. And if you want to recreate the CD exactly, there are specific tags for storing a binary dump of the TOC and TOC2 off of a CD.

Answer 3, sorry about that.



I'll check that topic, thanks.

A friend of mine had a Sony high end car head unit which claimed to supported CD-TEXT, I'm sure most high end CD players support CD-TEXT but that is not the only reason to included it in the CUE Sheet, If someone wants to extract to a single file (or create an image) this would be a very practical way of providing artist & titles for each track, all the decoder would have to do is read the CUE points & CD-TEXT in the CUE sheet.

oh, I'm sure there are examples of players that display CD-TEXT, as I'm sure there are discs that come with CD-TEXT on them. I just don't think either one is terribly common.
Personally, I think it would be nice if flac embedded cue sheets did support CD-TEXT. not so much for cheezy hacks to get around doing proper metadata, but for being able to truly re-create a cd from an archival copy in the few cases where the original did have CD-TEXT embedded. But I haven't really looked into the character set issues they mention, and I hear that it's non-trivial to really support CD-TEXT (to the full spec) properly.

it's not possible to fully represent CD-TEXT in a cuesheet. it's stored in the subcode data and is quite a complex spec.

Joh