The Well-Tempered Computer

An introduction to computer audio

Cue sheet

A cue sheet is a plain text file describing the contents of a CD or DVD including the position of the tracks.
It can also be used to describe the contents of a computer audio file.
If you have problems tagging WAV, you can use a cue sheet as an alternative.
Some even prefer to rip a CD to a single file and use a cue sheet instead of the more common file per track/tagging method.
It can also be used to mark sections in long live recordings.

 

REM GENRE Classical
REM DATE 2003
REM DISCID CF10E50F
REM COMMENT "ExactAudioCopy v0.99pb4"
PERFORMER "Miklós Spányi & János Sebestyén"
TITLE "Music for two Organs from the 18th &19th Centuries"
FILE "Music for two Organs from the 18th-19th Centuries.flac" WAVE
TRACK 01 AUDIO
TITLE "Daniel Gottlieb Steibelt - Sonata in G major"
PERFORMER "Miklós Spányi & János Sebestyén"
INDEX 01 00:00:00
TRACK 02 AUDIO
TITLE "Ferdinando Bonazzi - Pastorale in E flat major - Andante"
PERFORMER "Miklós Spányi & János Sebestyén"
INDEX 01 03:45:57

 

The number of tags is rather limited.

Anything prefixed with REM is a comment but programs can use this to store additional information not supported by the standard.

 

If you use cue-sheets you create a dependency.
The name in the FILE tag must match exactly the name in the file system.
If you rename the audio file, you have to edit the cue-sheet as well.
Likewise if you move the audio file, you have to move the cue-sheet as well.
Sounds trivial but media players might rename and move audio files and ignore the cue-sheet at the same time.

 

See the software section for more details

Reference
  1. Cue sheet - Hydrogenaudio
  2. Cue Sheet Syntax - Kodi Wiki

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© Vincent Kars December 2010