I'm taking a .wav rip and cue sheet (from EAC) and using CUETools 2.1.4 to split and encode it to separate FLAC tracks, my goal being to handle HTOA well.
The CUETools "Gaps Appended + HTOA" is fantastic, exactly the functionality I was looking for, except that I'm noticing that the FLAC produced from the HTOA, while correct, is missing any of the artist/album/track/etc FLAC tags. The other, "normal", tracks from the same rip have all tags set properly.
Is this a bug?
I think it's by design, but I don't see the harm in tagging, myself.
The issue of track numbering is something to think about. Do you want the total track count to include the HTOA as a track? Do you want the HTOA to be called track 00? A CD doesn't actually have such a thing; gaps belong to the track they precede, even though we don't like to rip them that way.
Thanks for the reply. Yeah -- I guess ideally one would have some control over the behavior. Personally I'd be happy enough if they tagged the HTOA as track "00", although I suppose it could confuse some players which don't believe a track 0 is possible.
At the least, though, setting album and artist and other track-independent tags would be nice. My play system is driven entirely by metadata, so tagless tracks are simply unfindable.
It's not a huge deal -- there are few HTOA discs and I can manually set the tags the way I want, but it would be nice if this just worked automatically.
So it turns out this is a little more annoying than I thought. Actually a very large proportion of discs have track 1 pregap; it's just that it is usually a blank 2 seconds. However, CUETools doesn't know that, of course, so it creates a small 00-HTOA track for each one.
This would be fine (it just means that starting the album involves 2 seconds of silence before you begin, as was intended), except that it turns out SqueezeBox doesn't ignore untagged tracks; it instead guesses metadata by file & path name, which use incompatible conventions. So my library does indeed get polluted by HTOA tracks with incorrectly-guessed metadata.
It would be much nicer if CUETools set metadata on HTOA tracks. Should be an easy change, yes? Any idea who to talk to? I'd be happy to make the change myself except I don't have a .net development environment so I wouldn't be able to test it...
Any idea who to talk to? I'd be happy to make the change myself except I don't have a .net development environment so I wouldn't be able to test it...
Thread: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=66233 (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=66233) . Gregory posted a day or two ago.
If you want to get rid of the 00's: Does Squeezebox support e.g. TAK? Convert them all to that (lossless!) format?
Bug tracker on SourceForge (https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=242216&atid=1118615) but not read as often as [a href='index.php?showtopic=66233']HydrogenAudio Forum Development Thread[/a]
EDIT: Looks like Porcus beat me to it.
So it turns out this is a little more annoying than I thought. Actually a very large proportion of discs have track 1 pregap; it's just that it is usually a blank 2 seconds. However, CUETools doesn't know that, of course, so it creates a small 00-HTOA track for each one.
I think that if you check "Gaps Appended" instead of "Gaps Appended + HTOA" in the CUETools tab of the Advanced Settings that doesn't happen anymore. It's better to only choose "Gaps Appended + HTOA" for the discs you know actually have HTOA.
Thanks. I posted on the dev thread.
@Cynic, I'd like consistent treatment of discs with and without HTOA, partly because I'm anal and partly because I'm doing batch conversions, so I want to use the same settings for all cue sheets. I.e., I don't want to be switching between "Gaps Appended" and "Gaps Appended + HTOA". Unless there's some hidden issue I'm not grokking, it just seems like it would be more consistent, correct, and useful behavior to set tags (possibly excepting the track # tag) on HTOA tracks. Why should they be tagless?