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Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

Use cue sheets

Ripping to .wav and .cue (in EAC) is easiest but you can also make them here*. The cue times are in minutes:seconds:frames, it's NOT base ten. While that usually doesn't matter, you can occasionally get errors from putting the wrong value in, like the track beginning a noticeable fraction of a second early or late (and it would certainly mess up a gapless recording). There are 75 frames per second.

The big problem with WAVs is that they take up about 10MB a minute. Lossless codecs lose no data and FLAC files is 30-70% the size of a WAVs (classical on the very low end and loud rock on the high -- it seems to vary by loudness). A well-encoded MP3 can sound almost exactly like the real thing at a much smaller file size, but, of course, throws out a good deal of the original file and can suffer from artifacts even at high bitrates.

* - for these CUEs to be playable in foobar, you have to open them up in Notepad (or whatever a simple text editor for Mac is) and change all of the "INDEX 00"s to "INDEX 01". Right-click the .cue and select "Open With" and select Notepad. Save it when you're done fixing it.

The freeware Burrrn has an excellent built-in .cue editor which can change all instances of a certain text into another; that is, you can have it change all "INDEX 00"s to "INDEX 01"s in one click. You can also change .wav to .flac (in the cue sheet's file path) with one click when you change formats, so you don't have to manually open every .cue and change it. You don't have to fix the files with .wav/.cue rips in EAC, though, except if you encode to FLAC or something).


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  • Use cue sheets - Mark Tinordi 07:38:21 11/18/06 (2)


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