I have a Squeezebox3 wireless music player, which uses the Slimserver software. Unfortunately Slimserver has a few bugs; External CUE's don't work in Slimserver at the moment (not sure when they will fix it), so i guess the best way forward for me is to embed them, as from what i can gather this method still works ok(ish). But as i have never done it, i have some questions;

1) I understand its posible with FLAC, but can CUE sheets be embedded into MP3 images and other formats?

2) How do i embed the external CUE sheets that i already have? (I'm looking for the easiest option here, i.e. can EAC, Foobar or another software do it).

3) Can CUE sheets be embedded at the time of ripping? I prefer to do it with EAC if possible.

Thanks.

Yes. All you are doing when embedding a cuesheet is setting a tag called CUESHEET to the value of the contents of your cue file. Obviously ID3v1 is out of the question, but most other tag formats will allow it.

Edit: Actually with FLAC it becomes a little more confusing. FLAC has a CUESHEET meta block - an inbuilt system to store a cuesheet. However this block strips TITLE/PERFORMER info so many people prefer to use a Vorbis comment - i.e.: a CUESHEET tag (which acts like any other tag and therefore you can store anything you want). You can search for more info on this.

foobar is most easy; Tag.exe would be a good command line solution.

Yes, you can embed at the time of ripping. WavPack makes this very easy with the ' -w "CUESHEET=@*.cue"' switch, but you can easily do it with other formats, especially if you use an application like REACT or WACK.

How do i go about doing this (for flac and MP3) with Foobar, i cant see the option anywhere.

Ok, i edited the tags in the FLAC files and added a tag called CUESHEET then pasted the contents of the .cue file into it (removing the file info bit as this seemed to mess it up) and it works fine as far as i can tell.

However, when i did the same for the MP3 files, it did not work at all. Any idea why?

foobar 0.9 won't recognise embedded cuesheet for MP3. 0.83 will I believe. There is also a Winamp plugin.

An alternative is MP4 with chapters.

Thats odd because i have 0.83.

I don't recall MP3 working with embedded cuesheets in 0.8.3 either.

Yeah, I guess I remember wrong. That's confused me.

I suppose you're stuck with Winamp for MP3+CUE, unless someone, somehow, creates a 3rd party plugin for foobar.

MP4 with chapters sounds like a good alternative.really

Edit: Ah, I've just realised my mistake. 0.8.3 will play MP3 with an external cuesheet. I see 0.9 will also - but for a while it didn't I believe.

NB: If you are using foobar I don't see much point in MP3 image + CUE - foobar will play LAME-encoded MP3s gaplessly anyway.

DJ sets and stuff like that are easier to handle with only one MP3. That's the way I see it. So embedded CUE sheets in MP3 would be nice. But I guess it's against some rules or requirements or standards...

I'll have to take your word for that.

I believe that it wasn't implemented due to poor seeking in MP3.

Edit: I've just noticed/remembered this:
Why is foobar an issue when you are using a Squeezebox?

Edit 2: If you need to play on both just keep the external cuesheet as well - use the MP3 for Squeezebox (if it plays MP3+CUE (if not why are we having this conversation)) and the CUE for foobar. Ta-da!

I was using Foobar to do the internal CUE sheet tagging and tagging in general and testing the validity of the CUE's. Once i know they work in Foobar, i test them with the Squeezebox.

OK.

I don't know anything about Squeezebox. Does the internal cuesheet have to have a correct FILE reference?

foobar doesn't appear to use this info - i.e.: the internal cuesheet can point to a WAVE with an incorrect filename, when the file is actually a FLAC.

If you need MP3 images with embedded cuesheet I would just test the requirements with one file, and once Squeezebox can read it then use foobar to perform the actions required on the others.

Best of luck.