Cue Sheets??

[jazzyguy]

Pardon my ignorance but I Googled the topic "Cue Sheets" and found a Wikipedia Article describing them but after printing out the article I could not make heads or tails of the definition. Can someone tell me what they are and how they are used in Decibel? Thanks in advance for your help.

[mattn]

A common way to obtain music nowadays is as a rip of the entire CD in some lossless format such as FLAC or Ape, plus a cue sheet saying what the tracks are called and the timings for where they start. In such a case, Decibel claims that you can hand it the cue sheet and it will display the tracks and let you play them.

[jazzyguy]

A common way to obtain music nowadays is as a rip of the entire CD in some lossless format such as FLAC or Ape, plus a cue sheet saying what the tracks are called and the timings for where they start. In such a case, Decibel claims that you can hand it the cue sheet and it will display the tracks and let you play them.

Why would a user do this when it is easy to rip the CD or play a Phonograph Analog Disc using an App like Audio Hijack Pro and create a Wav file and then convert it in iTunes or use XLD to convert it to FLAC. It seems a difficult thing to add another step or am I wrong? How would a user do this use TextEdit or some other Editor or use some script?

[mattn]

Why would a user do this

Some users prefer to leave the CD intact rather than dividing it into separate track files when ripping. But it's still nice to have complete track info (title, performer, etc.) for each track. It's like a CD plus a "table of contents". And then if you also transcode to compressed format like AAC to stick it in your iPod, all that info is there and goes right into the compressed file.

To give an example, I just finished ripping the complete Brilliant Classics Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach to flac + cue. And then I gave away the original CDs. I'd much rather have music files (flac + cue); CD is a bad transport medium.

It seems a difficult thing to add another step or am I wrong

There is no extra step. The ripper application just hands you the flac + cue or ape + cue or whatever you asked for, usually fetching the cue data from MusicBrainz or similar. Of course if you like you can hand-edit the cue file afterward; as you suggest, any text file editor can do that (I use BBEdit).

[jazzyguy]

Thank You for explaining,I appreciate your explanation.