dealing with .CUE files

[chaud lapin]

I am looking for a way to extract the separate tracks from whole albums encoded with Musepack and .CUE files. The latest version of K3b is supposed to have this functionality but I haven't had much success with it.

The cue2wave tool mentioned in a message in this forum from last year is no longer online.

TIA

[xmixahlx]

you need to EXTRACT the tracks individually? or do you need to burn the cue/mpc to AUDIO CD?

k3b 0.12.x (or from cvs > 0.11.95) will be able to handle musepack files. it decodes the mpc on-the-fly or in step1 (temp) depending on your configuration.

another way to do this is to: (1) decode to wav using mppdec (2) split by cue using shntool

or just decode to wav, then modify the cue to point to the new wav file and burn using k3b (cue/wav).


none of these methods should be problematic. you'll need mppdec and libmpcdec* for these functions, tho.


later

[chaud lapin]

Thanks for the ideas. As far as I can tell, there are not yet any media players for Linux which support CUE files, and playing monolithic files is a bit like going back to the cassette era.

There is a utility called mp3splt which can break down ALBW files into their consituent tracks. If I could find something like that for MPC and CUE sets, that would be ideal.

[xmixahlx]

actually, both xmms and lamip support cue files that i know of...

i would speculate that other players would, too


later

[chaud lapin]

Ahhh... I use xmms, but it is not at all obvious how it supports .cue files.

Maybe I don't know how a media player would support .cue files. What I am expecting is some kind of display of track information and maybe the ability to select individual tracks. Is this correct?

[xmixahlx]

xmms supports .cue files through a plugin (cueinfo).

it has some limitations, i.e. not handling 4 letter extensions properly (flac) and using a seperate window for the cue info, but it gets the job done. (you can enable the plugin in the general tab)

url: http://oskarsapps.mine.nu/xmms-cueinfo.html

lamip's implementation is a support plugin and does a better job of displaying the information. lamip is almost at a 0.0.3 release and i would recommend it at that time.


later

[Mr_Rabid_Teddybear]

And you also have mp3cue, so there's two different cuereader plugins for XMMS to choose from...

[chaud lapin]

Thanks for the tips; I wasn't aware of these programs. I downloaded the xmms-cueinfo source and and compiled it, and it works ok. I'll check out lampip shortly.

I found this interesting parenthetical comment about .cue files on the xmms-cueinfo homepage:

(The reason people do this is because of the audible gaps that occur when the software switches between two files. However, these gaps are generally shorter in unix-based operating systems than in Windows due to the simpler file I/O subsystem. There are also no-gap plugins for many players now, so there aren't really any good reasons for ripping CDs like this nowadays.)

So, perhaps .cue files will eventually fall out of favor.

[xmixahlx]

that quote seems a bit simplistic...

150 frames of silence (2 seconds) is still 2 seconds on *Nix or Win32.

people use CUE files to preserve the structure of a CD (gaps, etc) as well as include info for tagging or playback data.

until a better way comes about to rip a CD perfectly, CUE files will be around for a while.


later