Does Rockbox support '.cue' files for mp3's?

[rykos]

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.

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?

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]

 

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.

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]

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.

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.

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]

So once again we find ourselves let down by the worlds most 'popular' digital music format 

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)

Anyway, I have not seen foobar 'framewalking' a file, but would be interested to.  Is this a processory-intensive operation for it to perform?

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.

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.

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.

[dabotsonline]

Along with mp3cue, there is also a plugin for Winamp called Cue Player: http://winamp.com/plugins/details.php?id=143011 . MPlayer, foobar2000 and amaroK also support cuesheets.

Cuesheet support was also discussed on another forum recently: http://www.misticriver.net/showthread.php?t=39645 .

[saratoga]

Along with mp3cue, there is also a plugin for Winamp called Cue Player: http://winamp.com/plugins/details.php?id=143011 . MPlayer, foobar2000 and amaroK also support cuesheets.

Cuesheet support was also discussed on another forum recently: http://www.misticriver.net/showthread.php?t=39645 .

Ha, they use this thread as a source

[rykos]

ha!  so i am not the only person interested in seeing this functionality come to fruition then.

i am getting to the point where i would like sell my i-river because it will not play cue files.  it's a shame.

[Llorean]

What benefit does .cue offer that cannot be achieved in some other way?
Also, have you found some other portable that supports .cue files or something?

[saratoga]

What benefit does .cue offer that cannot be achieved in some other way?

There aren't any, but was a fairly popular way to rip for a while, and people don't like to have to covert stuff. 

[Llorean]

I mean there's a lot of technical reasons why .cue handling won't work well on Rockbox (mostly due to the fact that you have to load all of the file up to and including the track you want, and that our entire buffering and playlisting system would probably needed to be rewritten to implement this). This isn't so much as a "we don't want to" as it is a "It can't be done in a reasonable way without likely having costs greater than the gains, especially when a simple once-off preparation of your files completely negates the need for it.

[Kimmohoo]

I think Matroska would be a nice solution for this problem.

For an experiment, i muxed few of my cue+mp3 albums (Sandra Collins - Tranceport 3 and Teddy Douglas - Soulful House Experience 2) tuo MKA with Mkvtoolnix (http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix). Now i'm listening these albums on foobar2000 with matroskaplugin (http://dl.matroska.org/downloads/foobar2000) and it works wonderfully; Trackchanges are gapless, tagging is fast and flexible, replaygain works and seeking is almost instant! Matroska works much faster and nicer than cue-files.

With Mkvtoolnix its pretty easy, just add mp3-file to "input files", then go to Global and choose cue-file as a Chapter file. Then choose "Start muxing". You can mux multiple mp3+cue-files by adding them to job queues. Not too much of a problem. Of course if you have many mp3+cue-files it could be simplier and faster.. maybe somebody could write simple mp3+cue-to-mka tool for this purpose?

Of course, implementing multi-track matroska file support for rockbox might be problematic.. but it's nice solution for pc. 

[jaybeee]

I have a lot of DJ mixes that have been recorded via radio etc (let alone some CD rips that have been created as one long file with a cue sheet [my own CD collection is individual flac files]), and so CUE sheet support in Rockbox, even at it's most basic, would be really great for me.

Basically, multi-track files, like CUE files, are a pain in the b*tt for Rockbox. Mostly because Rockbox is designed from the ground up for one track per file. Multi-track files will cause quite a lot of grief:

1) A lot less accurate seeking for VBR files, since the TOC is so coarse
2) Random track play is difficult to implement
3) The tag database will be more complex

I'm sure there are more issues than those...

For me, (2) & (3) aren't a problem.  It really wouldn't bother me at all to not have a cue sheet included in the random track play functionality nor indeed to have cue sheets added to the tag db.  The seeking issue is more of a requirement for VBR files though.

So at it's basic, I'd love to see cue sheets supported by Rockbox that simply play back the one file accurately.  No need for any more complex use of cue sheets a la (2) & (3) imo.

I know there's a feature freeze, and I know that Rockbox isn't gonna 'like' cue sheets, but imo I think this would add the icing on the cake so to speak.

The Slim Devices people have managed to support CUE sheets in there software: I wonder if that would be a worthwhile starting place (it's open source code I believe): no point trying to reinvent the wheel (but I know Rockbox is Rockbox and not the Slimserver).  Just a thought 

[Llorean]

Nobody's yet offered any actual _advantage_ to cue sheets over properly split files.

[jaybeee]

Nobody's yet offered any actual _advantage_ to cue sheets over properly split files.

If I have 20gb of mp3 files that have a cue sheet say, then I do not need to split them as Rockbox will just play them (if and when it can) as if they were split (like the Slimdevices software does on my Squeezbox).  If I do have to split them, then I'll have one 'original' copy of the mp3 on my PC HDD, and then one copy of the split files on my DAP.  Fine until I want to clear my DAP and remove those files... but then I'll have to split again next time I want them on. Or I need keep two copies.  Or I guess I could keep just the one losslessly split 'copy' <--- but then that is just a workaround for a feature that seemingly a few people want.

TBH it's just convience for people that have files that have cue sheets

I don't have it as bad as some people though, cos I don't rip all my CDs to image / one large file.  But as I say, I have a lot of live music, that to split is just a hassle.