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using .cue files in foobar2000

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Posted on January 26, 2015 at 19:02:49
mike1127
Audiophile

Posts: 341
Joined: June 3, 2009
 Using foobar2000 on a couple different w7 laptops. One is foobar2000 v 1.3.3 and one is v 1.3.7.

Some of my .flac files are single files with an entire CD image and I have one .cue file for each one. I am having some sporadic behavior with foobar2000... sometimes it seems to automatically split the CD into tracks, and sometimes not.

I have a kind of hack solution that works on the foobar 1.3.3 computer. When I navigate with Windows Explorer to the folder containing the .cue file, and right-click on it and select "Open With Foobar2000," the default playlist suddenly shows all the tracks. But that isn't an ideal solution... I would like it to be automatic, plus it doesn't work at all on my other laptop.

Any ideas how to make foobar recognize the presence of a .cue file?

Also, maybe I want to use something other than foobar someday. Are there any FAQs on the available audiophile Windows players?

Mike

 

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RE: using .cue files in foobar2000, posted on January 27, 2015 at 15:05:34
Roseval
Audiophile

Posts: 1846
Joined: March 31, 2008
 " sometimes it seems to automatically split the CD into tracks, and sometimes not"
In these cases often the file name in the CUE is not exactly equal to the name in the file system.
Selecting the file name in Explorer and copy/paste it in the CUE often helps.
The Well Tempered Computer

 

Another solution is to split the CD image into separate files, posted on January 28, 2015 at 07:29:34
Feanor
Audiophile

Posts: 9873
Location: London, Ontario
Joined: June 17, 2003
Contributor
  Since: March 12, 2004
 This approach requires a special program, an CUE file, and of course, the CD image file. The most popular "special program" is Medieval CUE Splitter. It's freeware and works very well; see the link below.


Dmitri Shostakovich

 

RE: using .cue files in foobar2000, posted on January 28, 2015 at 08:20:59
Ryelands
Audiophile

Posts: 1867
Location: Scotland
Joined: January 9, 2009
 If you do decide to split one-track-per-album files, I can endorse the recommendation for Medieval's "Cue Splitter". Works a treat.

An IMHO excellent program that quickly writes cuesheets that work with Foobar (though it works only on one-file-per-track data) is Recursive Cue Creator by Al Jordan, who used to contribute to this forum. See link.

"The Recursive Cue Creator is a Java application that I wrote to generate cue sheets for use [with any] music player that supports cue sheets. The application will start at any directory you specify, and recursively drill through the directory structure, creating a separate cue sheet for each directory that contains wav or flac files."

I've been using it almost daily since he published it in 2011 (I do have a large collection). It does relative and absolute cuesheets both.

HTH

Dave

 

RE: Another solution is to split the CD image into separate files, posted on January 28, 2015 at 08:21:02
Roseval
Audiophile

Posts: 1846
Joined: March 31, 2008
 You don't need a special program.
Most media players including Foobar can split a cue+single file into a file per track. You don't need a CD image either, it works for all audio formats.
BTW: Medieval is not very accurate:
http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?showtopic=57563&st=0&p=683198&#entry683198
The Well Tempered Computer

 

RE: Another solution is to split the CD image into separate files, posted on January 28, 2015 at 08:39:30
Ryelands
Audiophile

Posts: 1867
Location: Scotland
Joined: January 9, 2009
 BTW: Medieval is not very accurate:

The report, which you've cited before, is now five years old and none too clear at that.

About three years ago, I used the program to help a friend sort out his by-then-very-muddled 1,000+ collection of one-track-per-album ripped CDs. For obvious reasons, he wanted to avoid re-ripping: I split the albums into files, tagged them using Tag&Rename and a few scripts and wrote cuesheets with Al's little utility.

My friend has not reported a single sonic hitch since. Trust me, if there'd been any, he'd have told me. IOW, the program works fine, at least for me.

 

RE: Another solution is to split the CD image into separate files, posted on January 28, 2015 at 09:18:03
Roseval
Audiophile

Posts: 1846
Joined: March 31, 2008
 I haven’t the slightest idea if the author ever addressed the problems mentioned.

Anyway current website says
Known bug: MPC engine can cause a bit of jitter at the beginning/end of tracks.
Limitations: MD5 checksum is not calculated for generated FLAC files



The Well Tempered Computer

 

RE: Another solution is to split the CD image into separate files, posted on January 28, 2015 at 10:15:55
Ryelands
Audiophile

Posts: 1867
Location: Scotland
Joined: January 9, 2009
 I haven't the slightest idea if the author ever addressed the problems mentioned.

I know - that was my point.

Anyway current website says
Known bug: MPC engine can cause a bit of jitter at the beginning/end of tracks.
Limitations: MD5 checksum is not calculated for generated FLAC files

Yes, I saw that. However, "MPC engine" refers to Musepack, a lossy format, albeit a purportedly high-quality one. It is of limited relevance in our context.

I don't see what sonic benefits calculating MD5 checksums might offer.

I'm not suggesting the program is the very best there is - I haven't tried any others. I'm saying simply that it works and worked well for me in a data-intensive application. IOW, the comments about it on your otherwise excellent web site are potentially misleading.

 

RE: Another solution is to split the CD image into separate files, posted on January 28, 2015 at 10:27:46
Roseval
Audiophile

Posts: 1846
Joined: March 31, 2008
 MD5 allows you to test the integrity of the audio part.
Although rare, sometimes some bits will topple over probably because the memory of a PC is most of the time not ECC.
I discovered a couple of flaws in my collection by running the MD5 test.
The Well Tempered Computer

 

RE: Another solution is to split the CD image into separate files, posted on January 28, 2015 at 11:44:59
mike1127
Audiophile

Posts: 341
Joined: June 3, 2009
 I discovered that foobar2000 can do the splitting! And it works! First open the cue file from the file menu, then select all the resulting tracks, right-click and select Convert. You get a menu that does many format conversions. Select flac. It seems to automatically know in the case of a one-flac-per-album file that you want to split into flac tracks.

The only thing that remains is to do some critical listening to make sure it doesn't affect sound quality. It shouldn't, as it has no reason to change the audio data even when re-encoding it, but never take anything for granted.

By the way, splitting a flac would, by my guess, need reencoding of each track, not just dividing up the bytes of the original flac. If it were a wav, raw PCM, then it would just be simple division of the file, but encoding a flac requires an analysis of patterns within the raw data.

 

RE: Another solution is to split the CD image into separate files, posted on January 28, 2015 at 12:34:19
Tony Lauck
Audiophile

Posts: 13629
Location: Vermont
Joined: November 12, 2007
 "BTW: Medieval is not very accurate:"

Could be. Or it could be that there were problems with the original rip. If, for example, there were offset errors, this could account for differences, e.g. CRCs. However, it could be that there were no audible problems from the splits. To correctly diagnose this would require the original CD, the single WAV file and the split WAV files. (There is also the possibility that the original CD was not in a correct format, in which case it might be hard to fairly allocate blame.)

The root of this problem is the poor quality of the CD audio on-disk coding format selected by Philips and Sony, particularly with respect to the robustness of the framing in the presence of data errors. (Similar error correcting codes were used on washing machine sizedhard drives (of this era. There were all kinds of framing problems that were found and had to be fixed before the error correcting codes were robust enough for data. But Redbook was deemed "good enough for audio" and then the marketing people upgraded this to "perfect sound forever".

Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar

 

RE: Another solution is to split the CD image into separate files, posted on January 28, 2015 at 12:48:25
Tony Lauck
Audiophile

Posts: 13629
Location: Vermont
Joined: November 12, 2007
 Yes, FLAC will do a complete reencoding. Among other reasons, it has to do this to verify and generate the checksum that verifies the FLAC file was not corrupted. One can also reencode a FLAC file with a different compression level and again, first it will be decoded and then it will be encoded.

With MP3, there can be problems with getting gapless playback that is glitch free. That's because MP3 throws away information based on context. In contrast, lossless CODECs do not throw away information. They build a model (predictor) of the likely samples, but even if the predictor is wrong they will still produce the correct output (but less compressed) because they encode the difference between the prediction and reality.

Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar

 

RE: Another solution is to split the CD image into separate files, posted on January 28, 2015 at 13:00:48
Roseval
Audiophile

Posts: 1846
Joined: March 31, 2008
 According to this http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?s=3239e8686268a1632c3996e5174d1cf3&showtopic=57563&view=findpost&p=683198

the problems where found after the rip by comparing the results of 3 different split tools
The Well Tempered Computer

 

RE: using .cue files in foobar2000, posted on January 29, 2015 at 05:11:49
aljordan
Audiophile

Posts: 1252
Location: Southern Maine
Joined: November 4, 2003
 Hi Ryelands,

I am still here, but try not to get into the ruckus. I've been working on writing an audio player for Windows. If you want to try it, please PM me.

Alan

 

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