This is a cross post from the Foobar forum (don't shoot me). There is no EAC forum that I know of, so I put it here.

No Foobar support for EAC NonCompliant Cue Sheets?

I'm not referring to any old cue sheet which may be somewhat non-standard, but specifically to the variation of .cue sheet that Exact Audio Copy is optionally capable of producing on purpose. I believe EAC refers to these .cue sheets as NonCompliant.

Essential EAC Ripping Guide - Gaps & CUE Sheets:

http://users.fulladsl.be/spb2267/gapscue/gapscue.htm

Essential EAC Ripping Guide:

http://users.fulladsl.be/spb2267/

I'm not a EAC expert & don't use it for burning. I think of it as a very accurate ripping tool.

From what I understand someone would opt to output this type of .cue sheet from EAC when they want to output multiple files (songs versus one big album image) with Gaps. Something about ending up with the exact copy of the original and what goes on in between songs in terms of silence or whatever.

Anyhow, EAC can use these .cue sheets to burn the CD but other app's might not and some media players might not be able to use them at all or do some strange things with them.

I THINK that Burrrn (which is very .cue sheet tolerant) handles these .cue sheets with no problem.

I HOPE SO anyhow, because I see where FooBar may APPEAR to accept one of these .cue sheets, displaying all the right song titles, but actually PLAY one of the tracks TWICE. I'd hate to think I have burnt any CD's that are missing a song & play one of the songs twice instead. I now suspect that it may have been one of these EAC NonCompliant .cue sheets that caused WinAMP to play the last track for every track.

I think it has to do with the inconsistant placement of the FILE statement in the .cue sheet, which seems to not always be in the same order in relation to the other statements, for one or more tracks.

Thing is I think it is good to have individual .flac, or .ape song files instead of one big album.flac or album.ape so you can have a choice to play individual songs or the whole album (using the .cue sheet) in FooBar.

Its nice to have just one .cue sheet for burning AND playing the songs on your computer.

Sometimes you will have individual song files with more than one .cue file, one of them plainly labeld "for burning" or "NonCompliant".

I'm interested in any comments on the issue of NonCompliant .cue sheets & FooBar.

It would be real nice if Foobar could handle them correctly without any problems.

Non-compliant cuesheets are supposed to be used with EAC only. The name "non-compliant" is because it is not compliant with Goldenhawk's Cuesheet standard and therefore not compliant with any other software. It is possible to use compliant cuesheet with multiple flac files (just choose to append gaps to the next track) and there is no significant reason not to do so.

Non-compliant cues are only necessary if you want to retain pregaps by appending them to the ends of tracks (when ripping). It's just a matter of preference, and not critical to getting an ''exact'' copy.

CDs burned with EAC or Burrrn using a non-compliant cue should have no such problem.

Cues aren't needed at all for playback of individual tracks. With an image file (''album.flac''), the cue sheet gives you the choice to play individual tracks or the whole album.

Why insist on using a cue sheet for playback of individual tracks?

The combination simply doesn't work, and there's no need for it to work.

Actually, if you do this a lot of your ripped tracks will start with a 2-second silence which is annoying to say the least. (and, I suppose, would interfere with playback using a crossfader.) This is the whole reason non-compliant cuesheets are used.



But it used to work!
And there's definitely a reason for it to work. A lot of people have non-compliant cuesheets (as is recommended in most eac ripping guides) and want to use foobar to convert to other formats. When converting an entire album, you would want to use the cuesheet.

Anyway, cuetools can help you out. I have some documentation about it on my site.

I hate to break it to you but the information on your site isn't exactly correct.


Noncompliant cuesheets are not needed if you want to append the gap to the end of the previous track.

When ripping separate tracks, noncompliant cuesheets have nothing to do with where gaps are placed.

Gaps are automatically appended to the previous track by default with (almost, if not) every ripping program.

If tracks are ripped with gaps prepended to the next track, a noncompliant cuesheet will not be able to keep the track from beginning with a gap upon playback.

"This is the best way to play back the individual files since otherwise they would start with silence."
This statement is totally false!

Are you saying foobar2000 used to convert files and their non-compliant cuesheets to other formats, and retain the pregap info?

I know you're probably knowledgeable enough to know this, but some folks might get the wrong idea from that statement. Especially if they don't follow the context which I think you intended.

Non-compliant cue sheets have everything to do with the placement of gaps. If tracks are ripped with gaps appended to the end of previous tracks, and you want to actually retain the gap info, then no other cue type is relevant.

Though you can certainly use a cue sheet without gap info (such as EAC's "Multiple WAV Files with Leftout Gaps") - which would be ''compliant'' - no matter where the gaps were placed.

Sure, if taken out of context I'd be looking more foolish than usual. Luckily the context is included in the statement: "When ripping separate tracks, noncompliant cuesheets have nothing to do with where gaps are placed." This statement is absolutely true.

Noncompliant cuesheets and cuesheets in general have everything to do with the placement of gaps when burning. However this topic is not about burning, it is about playback. Placement of gaps is dependent on the configuration of the software used to do the ripping. Which type of cuesheet is made (if a cuesheet is made) has no bearing on how the software is configured.

Had this topic been about burning, I'd be singing a different tune.

To take this a bit farther, although a cuesheet has everything to do with gap placement upon burning, using the wrong cuesheet cannot and will not give you back the original gap behavior (unless the original has no gaps).

Now it may be true that a cue sheet can influence the playback of gaps in a player (I really don't know since I wouldn't even think of using a cuesheet with separate tracks as anything more than a playlist), but like with burning, using the wrong one can produce undesired results. If, for example, a corrected gaps cuesheet is used with tracks where gaps were apended to the previous track, the beginning of a track may start late.

Well unfortunately I did not create this .cue sheet & I'm come across them all the time. With some trial & error and notepad I have rearranged such .cue sheets to work with FooBar. Would be great if foobar could handle them, or if there was a utility to do this work for me.



OK, but SOME other software appears to handle the so called non compliant .cue sheets no problem. For example, my main reason for using Burrrn instead of Nero is Nero is so picky about .cue sheets & can't deal with a .cue sheet pointing to individual song files regardless of format.

I'm 99% sure Burrrn can handle EAC non-compliant cue sheets no problem, so it is technically possible to design software that does.

Also, while Goldenhawk may have invented .cue sheets, or whatever, IMHO they are far less famous & in use far less often than EITHER EAC and/or foobar. While EAC's NonCompliant .cue sheet might not conform to Goldenhawk's (proprietary?) standard, EAC pretty much SETS the standard in some people's minds.

I think foobar's reputation is built on its power, its ability to be customized to work like YOU want it to work. Personally I have just scratched the surface of what foobar can do, and it seems a pity it can't do this (handle EAC non-compliant .cue sheets).

I have heard of this Cue Tools. It seems to be buried in the author's web site.

Anyhow, if this utility can quickly convert a non-compliant .cue sheet with MULTIPLE files (tracks) to a compliant .cue sheet with MULTIPLE files it may be just what I'm looking for.

I guess what I would do, is use Burrrn to burn the album using the Non-Compliant .cue sheet to derive whatever benefit that .cue sheet has to offer for burning, and then use the compliant .cue sheet as my play list in Foobar.

I have little interest in .mp3 files and prefer FLAC or APE.

I used to burn & delete FLAC & APE because I don't have enough disk to keep FLAC or APE. Then I thought in the future, disk capacity will sore, car stereo's will have USB ports or Card Slots, or hard drives. CD's take up space, can't be sorted except by hand, etc. etc.

If there were affordable devices that could play .flac or .ape files off a CD I would start burning the .flac or .ape data files and forget about burning as CDA audio. Unfortunately it is amazing how little audio hardware is available that can handle either FLAC or APE. Everything is MP3 or WMA.

Anyhow I want to quit deleting the FLAC & APE files cause I think I will need them in the future, and think of the .cue files as my playlist.

Perhaps I have a fixation on .cue files and should just create a playlist. mp3tag can do that based on selecting all the files & doing a freedb lookup. It can't generate a .cue sheet, compliant or otherwise.

I guess what I reallly need is a music database program to track all my files but there doesn't seem to be a clear cut choice.

A misunderstanding I think...I never said that you can rip with gaps prepended to the next track and then use a non-compliant cuesheet to skip the silence. If you rip with gaps prepended to the next track, this implies you should use a corrected gaps cuesheet. If you rip with gaps appended to the previous track, you need to do this in combination with non-compliant cuesheets.
The type of cuesheet you use is dictated by what's in the audio files.


What I mean: IF you want to rip to individual tracks and IF you want to retain gap information and IF the gap contains silence, it's better to have the silence at the end of a track than at the beginning.

I have always wondered what people wanted to do when I see a rip to individual tracks with both a non-compliant, corrected gaps and gapless cuesheet included. I mean, only one of them will be correct, no?

Actually, I started looking into this whole mess when I myself came across the same problem described in the original post: foobar 0.9 no longer works with non-compliant cuesheets. I understand this is a design decision but feel that foobar should pop up a warning when it encounters such cuesheets.

edit: I do not agree that the cuesheet is only needed for burning. While this may be true for most cases, there are a not unsignificant amount of cd's which do have audio information in the gaps. In those cases I would want playback to start at the gap at the end of the previous song. I do agree however that this whole cuesheet thing is one big mess. Which is why I only use image files for rips and transcode. (a strategy which works whether you use lossy or lossless.)

foobar should definitely pop up a warning when it encounters a cuesheet it can't process correctly.

Now that I think about it, my primary use of foobar is limited to a "test listen" of material to either

1) decide if I like it or not

2) see that everything is OK before burning. Up til now I figured if it doesn't play it won't burn.

3) see if the .cue sheet has track titles & performer - some don't, just say track01, track02
(in which case I use mp3tag to FIX the .cue sheet from FreeDB.org)

4) check for spelling errors in track titles

5) spot all lower case, or all uppercase titles which I adhore and will edit to be proper case (title case).

>>there are a not unsignificant amount of cd's which do have audio information in the gaps.

Does this have anything to do with "live albums" where you don't want a 2 second pause?

>>Which is why I only use image files for rips and transcode. (a strategy which works whether you use lossy or lossless.)

By transcode, you mean say convert .wav to .ape or .mp3?

OK, maybe only people with poor language abilities (like myself) are capable of thinking that the context was anything but crystal clear. I apologise for wasting your and anyone else's time.

Mostly, though I also have a few cd's where there is audio information in the gap before a song 'leading up to' the song but not directly part of it.



Yes.

Oh FYI: foobar2000 0.8.3 was able to playback seperate tracks "through" a non-compliant cue sheet. But 0.9 does not because the whole (or major parts) of the Audio CD subsystem was rewritten. foobar2000 is now more "compliant" and will complain about broken cue sheets when offered a non-compliant one. Maybe that's your problem.

If you have seperate tracks use them for playback, that's it.

@=trott=
You are absolutely correct, I misunderstood your statement about the best way to avoid playing tracks beginning with a gap. I thought you were saying that this was due to using CUE sheets rather than how you have EAC configured. I now know this isn't the case.

Perhaps it had to do with the context of this discussion as it was a question about noncompliant cue sheets in fb2k and not about gaps. Perhaps it's that the initial subject of your paragraph is noncompliant cue sheets and not appending gaps to the previous track.

People do often create more than one type of cue sheet when ripping and you are right, if EAC detects that there are gaps, only one of the cue sheets will be correct.

@Cosmo
I have never gotten the impression that you have poor language abilities. You appear to me as always being clear, concise and correct.

@directjj and everyone else
Sorry for going off-topic by talking about gap configuration. It seems to me that if you're ripping separate tracks in the standard way, you should be using a playlist with fb2k instead of cue sheets.

Allow me to add the following basic info:

- while noncompliant Cue sheets are useful for burning, they are basically useless for playback. Any Cue sheet can be useful for playback (to simulate the case of "separate tracks with gaps app. to prev. track") except noncompliant ones (since the case of "sep. tracks with gaps app. to prev. track" is already the case here!!!).

- correct playback of these noncompliant Cue sheets with foobar used to be possible up till version 0.9x (deliberate decision to no longer support Cue sheets that don't comply with the Cue standard, even though they are useful and popular).

Having started the thread, is there any advantage to using a .cue sheet versus a playlist for playing?

I know a playlist can be dragged into Nero for multi file albums but a multi file .cue sheet can't be used with Nero at all. But I assume the playlist might not burn an accurate copy as a .cue sheet, so use the .cue sheet with Burrrn & not the Playlist with Nero.

Is there a way to create a playlist from a .cue sheet?

I'm guessing foobar can create a playlist from the actual files, but I have never done it and depending on the name of the files, or the tags in the files, it might not display performer & song title like I want it in foobar.

Can foobar do a FreeDB lookup to create a playlist?

mp3tag can.

I need to look more at cue tools and see if it can create a compliant .cue sheet from a non-compliant cue sheet.

Foobar can do a lookup on FreeDB and tag the selected files. You can then save playlists from Foobar.

audiomars