Rockbox General > Rockbox General Discussion
Does Rockbox support '.cue' files for mp3's?
rykos:
--- Quote from: LinusN on March 01, 2006, 10:00:17 AM ---
--- Quote from: rykos on February 28, 2006, 01:07:23 PM ---A level of innaccuracy such as this is absolutely NO problem for me and would not be a problem for me in any Rockbox implementation.
--- End quote ---
So you wouldn't be annoyed at all if you switched to the next track, and Rockbox started playing the last 10 seconds of the current one before playing the next?
--- End quote ---
5 seconds, no.
10 seconds... maybe.
but not really. i honestly would just be delighted that my cue file was supported in even the most basic way.
honest!
twinsen:
--- Quote ---The concept of "one file, many tracks" does not just apply to cuefiles - the Ogg container format allows for "chained files" (basically, just individual Ogg files concatenated together) and the mp4 container allows for chapter marks.
--- End quote ---
But why you are against cue files ?
For me they are just important and common, native tag containers for whole CDs.
When I rip new CD with Exact Audio Copy, it writes one big wav file and a cuesheet.
But, why 2 files! I have one CD in my hand and want have 1 file on disc, with all data.
So, I personally use Monkey's Audio, others use FLAC or something like that for compressing audio.
Then, with a little help of Foobar2000 player, I embed cue file into my Monkey's Audio APE file.
And finally, I erase cue file from disk. Now I have complete backup of my CD, playable immediately
with Foobar2000. The only thing to play it is loading this one file to foorbar, which automatically
recognizes embedded cue tracklist, puts it on current playlist and plays it.
And... all above we simply want implemented in Rockbox. Why to complain if it is good or not.
This just IS. People use it. It's useful. Simply. Effective. Comfortable.
And, what other containers can do for me in this case? Basically - what MORE than this?
I listen to music usually as whole CDs, mainly concept albums, so I want to put my
APE CD images on my DAC and play it with track titles read from embedded cue.
Nothing more.
Probably there is many people interested in this feature. All we have hope, that programmers
understand us, and code it into Rockbox :-) Sooner, or later.
Llorean:
Well, at the moment APE can't really be incorporated into rockbox anyway. There are license issues, as well as the fact that the codec is apparently very x86-centric. So, if you want to do that once cue support is in, you'll probably need to transcode to flac.
As for the advantage of say, several OGG files: You can listen to them gaplessly, and still create a playlist of your favorite songs from various CDs, or mix things up for a party.
saratoga:
--- Quote from: twinsen on March 19, 2006, 10:44:02 PM ---
--- Quote ---The concept of "one file, many tracks" does not just apply to cuefiles - the Ogg container format allows for "chained files" (basically, just individual Ogg files concatenated together) and the mp4 container allows for chapter marks.
--- End quote ---
But why you are against cue files ?
For me they are just important and common, native tag containers for whole CDs.
When I rip new CD with Exact Audio Copy, it writes one big wav file and a cuesheet.
But, why 2 files! I have one CD in my hand and want have 1 file on disc, with all data.
So, I personally use Monkey's Audio, others use FLAC or something like that for compressing audio.
Then, with a little help of Foobar2000 player, I embed cue file into my Monkey's Audio APE file.
And finally, I erase cue file from disk. Now I have complete backup of my CD, playable immediately
with Foobar2000. The only thing to play it is loading this one file to foorbar, which automatically
recognizes embedded cue tracklist, puts it on current playlist and plays it.
And... all above we simply want implemented in Rockbox. Why to complain if it is good or not.
This just IS. People use it. It's useful. Simply. Effective. Comfortable.
And, what other containers can do for me in this case? Basically - what MORE than this?
I listen to music usually as whole CDs, mainly concept albums, so I want to put my
APE CD images on my DAC and play it with track titles read from embedded cue.
Nothing more.
--- End quote ---
Rockbox support. You're never going to get APE support on any DAPs (nevermind embedded cues). At least not unless a lot changes.
I think you could use embedded cues with FLAC though, which would probably be feasible to implement in Rockbox. Since the Ogg container already supports all features of cue files, it shouldn't be too hard to support cue sheets in Vorbis and FLAC.
saratoga:
--- Quote from: rykos on February 28, 2006, 01:07:23 PM ---So once again we find ourselves let down by the worlds most 'popular' digital music format :(
--- End quote ---
The problem is the container, not the format. MP3 wrapped in a proper container like MP4 or MKA would not have this problem. The cue method does since it does not actually have a container, and thus cannot properly seek. (you'd see the same problem if you tried to do this on a raw .aac stream instead of an m4a file with AAC inside)
--- Quote ---Anyway, I have not seen foobar 'framewalking' a file, but would be interested to. Is this a processory-intensive operation for it to perform?
--- End quote ---
It can seek at about 200x on my 3.2GHz P4, which is acceptable if you have a fast PC and a reasonable length cue (though the foobar forums are filled with people complaining about it anyway). I don't know how fast the decoder on Rockbox is right now for various platforms. Probably <5x on most platforms, so you'd be looking at ~5-10 minutes to seek halfway through a CD image with MP3 + cue. Not much fun.
--- Quote ---My Winamp pulls it off without any problem - it just uses the cue list as a fast forwarding feature, rather like the study mode. It's instantaneous.
For anyone who's interested in using it, or more importantly, having a look at it for Rockbox purposes, the website for the plugin is http://www.guerillasoft.co.uk/mp3cue
Please note the first heading in the FAQ section of that page:
It's not accurate!
Yes it is (I think). For CBR mp3s, the accuracy is the same as for a wav file, and the same as for a CD. The problem comes with VBR mp3s. Winamp uses a fast, inaccurate method to seek positions within mp3s (otherwise it would take a second or so to seek...). This messes up the accuracy a bit, but it's not the fault of mp3cue (or Winamp, really).
A level of innaccuracy such as this is absolutely NO problem for me and would not be a problem for me in any Rockbox implementation.
--- End quote ---
Note that inaccurate seeking precludes the use of gapless files, so for this method to work, you'd need to either give up gapless decoding. Or maybe have two MP3 decoders (or one with two modes), so that you could vary the seek method depending on how the file is loaded. And even then you still won't be able to seek to the right place in MP3 files using cues.
Neither seems like a great solution IMO. My solution would be to require cue files to only work with containers that support fast seeking, and to then to add support for MP3 in MP4/MKA/whatever (Vorbis and Flac would work normally since they're already in Ogg). That would solve the seeking problem, but I'm guessing people will complain if they're made to do this in advance.
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