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Topic: Can a cue sheet be made from external data like MusicBrainz? (Read 3220 times) previous topic - next topic
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Can a cue sheet be made from external data like MusicBrainz?

Hi all,

I have about 70 discs of audiobooks that my Dad wants converted to a portable format. They have been ripped to flac (for stoage space reasons) and the originals are back with him, but due to an error in ripping they are all one file per title and no embedded or separate cue files for their individual chapters.
However some are listed on the likes of MusicBrainz, CDDB, Discogs etc and there is access to TOC or track info.
Does anyone know of a software which can use this info to create a cue sheet. I have seen many that access these databases but don't seem to be able to use the info in this way.

Many thanks for any help, and i'm sorry if this is already posted about, I searched but couldn't find a recent topic that matched my query.

Re: Can a cue sheet be made from external data like MusicBrainz?

Reply #1 –
There is at least one website which generates a dummy cue sheet from freedb data. I don't really want to link to it here, because its primary purpose, I believe, is to help kids looking for brownie points on pirate sites pass off as "complete" whatever they found in the wild. You can surely Google it.

For a different purpose (more like yours), I wrote a JavaScript function (TOCtoCUE) to turn a MusicBrainz TOC (as seen when you click on a disc ID on their website) into the "guts" of a cue sheet. Paste the function definition into a JavaScript console or shell and then give it a try as shown in the examples. You will still have to author the rest of the cue sheet yourself; I wasn't trying to make something that would generate the whole thing.

Another option is to just divide the file yourself, instead of relying on some database's info about what could be different discs than what you actually have. There's an old Windows app called CD Wave which can automatically or manually process a WAV file and allows you export a cue sheet for it. It only operates on WAV files, so you'll have to convert your FLAC or whatever to WAV first, but then you can edit the resulting .cue to refer to the original file. It has a GUI and is not too hard to use, once you get used to it.

Yet another thing I'll sometimes do is load the audio into a wave editor, and set the editor to display the time in CD sector/frame units and to snap markers to the nearest frame. Then I can just zoom in and drop markers at the ideal locations, and then transcribe or export the list of markers, which I can then copy-paste into a hand-authored cue sheet.

Re: Can a cue sheet be made from external data like MusicBrainz?

Reply #2 –
CueMaster can retrieve data from freedb and create a CUE sheet. The program was created to work with mp3 files so the FILE line in the CUE sheet would need to be edited to use your flac file.
korth