Windows Media Player with FLAC Cue Sheets, work?

2005-06-05 22:40:32

A newb here, but hey, I have gotten really far to date with this being my first post.

Sorry if the question is basic and show a misunderstanding of FLAC or Cue Sheets, but after much research I have decided to use a combo of FLAC and LAME for my needs of long term archival of lossless CDs (i.e. rip only once) and player compatibility with my mp3s.  I am now stumped in understanding if WMP 10 can decipher Cue Sheets and if so, how do I get the same catalog type info to register in WMP 10 that one enjoys with an mp3.

I have successfully set up EAC, Flacattack, etc. and ripped a couple of CDs into two different directories, one with my Flac rips and the other with my LAME rips.  I plan to use LAME for my portables, PhatBox, Audiotron and Creative Wireless Music player since they support mp3 but not all support Ogg Vorbis, AAC, etc.  I want to use WMP 10 to playback the Flac files since in addition to using these for long term archival and recoding, etc. I might as well enjoy the fact that I have my media PC directly connected to my AVR so if the HDD is there, heck, why not playback lossless on my primary system.  So, I have everything working now, even playback on WMP 10 after downloading the required codecs and I am stuck at the point of figuring out if and how I can get WMP to use a Cue Sheet to give me the same track information as one gets with an mp3 file, etc.

I know some will say why use WMP for my player but it is simple, I have a WiFi network and an old iPaq was laying around so with a WiFi CF card it serves as my remote control for the WMP with a cool little app I have called Zerama Remote....therefore, I can remote control WMP with a handheld and not have to buy another network music player for that location of AVR coincident with Media PC.

Any help on my WMP using Cue sheets question would be helpful.

Windows Media Player with FLAC Cue Sheets, work?

Reply #1 – 2005-06-09 15:41:59

I don't believe WMP supports cuesheets.

Windows Media Player with FLAC Cue Sheets, work?

Reply #2 – 2005-06-10 15:09:06

In principal WMP could 'understand' CUE sheets if somebody made a FLAC parser filter reading the CUE, and presenting a tray icon on your desktop offering you the songs of the album.

In addition to that, WMP 10 might even have a kind of chapter interface within DirectShow, and again this is something the FLAC splitter filter could make use of, after reading the CUE data, converting them into kind of chapter entries ( seek points ), and presenting this info to the chapter PIN.

I really never was using WMP since a long time, but i seem to remember we once had a matroska splitter making use of the native DirectShow chapter entries, so that chapters in MKV video files could be selected from WMP. However, i am using other players with direct MKV chapter support since a long time, so i cant really remember. Today i have Haali's MKV splitter installed, using the tray icon, and pls. dont mind that i am too lazy deinstalling it, installing older filter versions and testing if WMP could make use of them or not once.

Your biggest problem, despite the theoretical question if WMP has a suitable interface or not, is the fact that such FLAC splitter is not existing yet, and i also dont know if any of the active DirectShow devs around Xiph have plans to support such.

As a result of that, you only have two options :

1. Use Foobar2000 instead of WMP for playing your FLAC files, with full CUE sheet support

2. Pack your FLAC files into matroska container, converting the CUE sheet into valid chapter entries, and use Haali's MKV/MKA splitter with the tray icon chapter access with WMP. There are various threads of how to do this best way, there have been even EAC scripts doing it in an automatic process.

Regards

Christian
matroska project admin
http://www.matroska.org