I'm looking to purchase a Squeezebox3. I know that it now natively supports FLAC, and the website indicates that it also supports cuesheets, but it indicates cuesheets with MP3. Is anyone using FLAC with cuesheets on the Squeezebox?

Both flac native and external cuesheets used to work, but they are broken in the current stable release (6.2.1)

They will probably be fixed for the next release (6.5). As far as I know only mp3+cue is officially supported but as there are many flac+cue users if this breaks it is usually quickly fixed.

Does anyone know what happened with Squeezebox Wavpack support?

I was kind of wondering that myself...

I hope they don't, otherwise I'm forced to run and buy one, even more if they support embedded cuesheets!

You should buy one, right now, and report back with your findings

I wouldn't be surprised if it is added sometime soon. I doubt it'll be supported in the hardware soon, but at least in the software. Really it would only require a capable programmer who was familiar with both wavpack and the squeezebox. If I were one of those I'd have done it by now, but I couldn't write one line of code if my life depended on it, let alone perl.

EDIT: Forgot to comment on the topic.
It does support cuesheets, or did, as jth said. Will again soon I'm sure. Embedded and otherwise.

There is just not a lot of demand. It already supports FLAC natively and will decompress Apple and Microsoft lossless (and Monkey's Audio) at the server to stream as WAV. I'd say that covers the vast majority of collections.

That said, I had very basic wavpack playback working some time ago but I lost interest after they integrated FLAC in the hardware and never completed the work. It is not a difficult project to undertake for someone who knows both perl and wavpack.

Well, I'm sorry to inform you of this, but I am working on WavPack support for SqueezeBox now! I got one a couple weeks ago and have been really enjoying it!

Of course, I can't [yet] write a line of Perl. Maybe I'll just never figure it out...

OMG! Time to break my piggy-bank?

I suppose you're working on the server-side... Will embedded cuesheets be supported? Replaygain? Any hope to see WavPack supported client-side? Do you think it will be a significant plus or it really doesn't matter... just more bandwidth used?

Keep on working!

Cheers!

Sergio

OK, now I'm completely freezing my ripping project until further notice

There's no easy way to add the decoding to the device itself because that source is not open, so this is on the server side. And I believe that cuesheets and replaygain are already there, so including them in WavPack support should not be a problem.

Yes, obviously transcoding WavPack -hx to FLAC -0 will create a little more bandwidth (and use some CPU cycles) but probably not too significant. Of course, in the case of WavPack lossy the difference will be more significant.

One advantage of transcoding is that it will work with hybrid lossless mode, which would probably never be implemented on the hardware (like RockBox).

So... you will be transcoding to FLAC and leverage on the native FLAC support of the Squeezebox, trading CPU cylces for bandwidth. Maybe you can consider also (as an option) to just decode to PCM, have more bandwidth used but less strain on the CPU, for situation where CPU cycles are not abundant...

I think you have that option now with all the transcodes because their older models did not support FLAC. In fact, the oldest only supports MP3 (no PCM) so they transcode to that device using LAME.

One thing I like about Slim Devices is how they support all of their previous products.

You as a user can easily change this with a few edits to a configuration file - it is set on a per player basis. Going to PCM is actually the default for the older Squeezebox1 model.

Thank-you to Bryant and jth for clarifying. Not owning a Squeezbox (yet.. ) I wasn't aware of that...

Anyone interested in testing the Squeezebox file compatiblity, can do so without buying a Squeezebox.

You can install the Slimserver software and then use the Softsqueeze PC client to emulate the actual playback hardware.

I was doing this last night. One thing I did notice. Playing back FLAC CD images used a lot more CPU on the server than playing back individual FLAC files. The server is an old Celeron. Typical CPU with individual FLAC files was about 5%. That jumped to about 25% when playing back images. YMMV.

I noticed that cuesheets didn't work properly with the Slimserver 6.21. Tonight I will try out the 6.5 beta version.

Edit: Read a post over on the Slimserver board that suggests that the CUESHEET tag doesn't work, but using metaflac to embed the cuesheet does work with the latest Slimserver beta. I'll try this tonight.

While the slim hardware supports FLAC playback, it does not understand cuesheets. So in order to support cuesheets, the server must do a decompress at the right seek point and then it recompresses to FLAC to send to the unit. This explains the extra cpu. I'm not sure if cuesheets in the hardware will ever be supported. If you have more spare bandwidth than server cpu, you might fiddle with convert.conf to have the server use WAV instead.

I stopped using cuesheets for mp3 and flac for unrelated reasons, but in my opinion the extra problems they cause squeezebox and other players aren't worth it - especially since FLAC is gapless by design.