EAC, FLAC, and cuesheet tags
Eric Levy
I've recently decided to undertake the archival of my CD collection
onto hard disk. I've decided to use FLAC lossless compression to save
space without quality reduction. I would like to use Exact Audio Copy
because it's free and apparently well-recommended (unless someone has a
better suggestion). EAC can autamatically apply an external compressor,
and some usenet message, which I've lost, recommended the following
options string for the FLAC encoder execution from EAC:
-o %d -8 -V --lax --no-padding -T TITLE="%t" -T ARTIST="%a" -T
ALBUM="%g" -T TRACKNUMBER=%n -T GENRE="%m" -T DATE="%y" -T COMMENT="EAC
0.95pb3 & FLAC 1.1.0" %s
This properly tags the file, so that it can be readily used with the
media library feature of many jukebox applications. I've decided that
WinAMP 5 is my favorite.
Now, I've noticed that EAC is capable of generating CUE sheets.
I've also noticed that there is a FLAC tag for a CUE sheet. It seems
possible then to add to the above scheme the inclusion of cueing data in
the FLAC files. Presumably, doing this would make playback of the
sequence of FLAC files more similar to playback of the original CD.
However, using EAC, doing this requires extra manual labor. This labor
is compounded by the restriction that the location and name of the
generated CUE sheets cannot be controlled within EAC.
My questions are: 1) is there an easier way to include CUE sheet
data in the FLAC result, and 2) what would be the major benefit of doing
this before I play my files under WinAMP with the FLAC plugin?
Thanks, and please email responses to elev...@swarthmore.edu, with
the three b's removed.
Eric Levy