Hi

I have demuxed a single AC3 file lasting 35' (Air - Electronic performers, bonus dvd) with Smartripper. I just resampled a copy to get 44,1 Khz .wav to burn on a cd-r with HeadAC3he, will try also Besweet to make a comparison.

Firstly I had considered to encode that .wav in musepack for my PC archive, but obviously there would be a further loss of quality. So I decided to keep the original AC3 on my computer, foobar plays it flawlessly. My problem is now, how to skip from track to track?

Is there some tool providing a cue-sheet for this large file?
If not, is there something to split (best of all, gaplessly ) the AC3 file?
Sorry if this was answered before
Thanks

TF

According to Doom9's Audio FAQ you can split AC3 files using BeSplit:

I don't know about gapless playback in this case.

You can also generate .cue files quite easily starting from an existing .cue file (extract a CD to single .wav + .cue with e.g. EAC) and editing it with a text editor. If you use foobar2000 as player, you get gapless playback as its AC3 input plugin supports sample-accurate searching (thanks kode54!).

You could mux your ac3 file into Matroska conatiner user mkvtoolnix/mmg and set a chapter to the beginning of every song. Foobar shows the different chapters as different songs.

Edit: Added a screenshot showing the trick in Foobar using flac encoded file.
Edit2: I just checked that this method is gapless at least using the newest version of Foobar (it wasn't gapless with earlier versions).

Thanks!
After some tryout I decided to use cuesheets for keeping the file intact, but the splitting of the AC3 is effective as well, and I think this could be a preferred method in association with a .m3u playlist (where you can also add different kind of files, as I did with the Air cd (musepack) -dvd (ac3) I worked with. I second the gapless playback supporting of foobar 2000.
I guess the matroska / mkvtoolnix is beyond my understanding for the time being.
I'm not a technician at all

would it be possible to mux two (or more) ac3 files in matroska with the same cue positions and the ability to switch between those in fb2k?

like:

matroska:
5channel_clip1 |clip1 |clip2 |clipn |
5channel_clip2 |clip1 |clip2 |clipn |
5channel_clip3 |clip1 |clip2 |clipn |

output:
switch to clip1 or clip2 or clip3

Treefingers:
It isn't hard to use mkvtoolnix to create some audio matroska files.
1. Open mmg.exe
2. Click "add" and select your audio file.
3. Go to "global" tab.
4. Click "browse" next to "chapter file" and select your cue file.
5. Click "browse" next to "output filename" and select a output file.
6. Click "start muxing."

Smok3:
It is possible to mux many audi tracks into Matroska file but as far as i know Foobar doesn't support switching between them. You need to push the Foobar developers to implement it.

Latexxx: true, actually it wont play ac3 in mkv at all,

mpc will play such files just fine.