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Topic: Why are cuesheets needed for ripping audio? (Read 2658 times) previous topic - next topic
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Why are cuesheets needed for ripping audio?

I understand the purpose of cuesheets used with ripped audio. But I have been trying to understand why cuesheets are required when making an image of an audio CD. Isn't a CD image a sequence of bits which can be saved as a file on a hard drive, with all the track information and audio information intact? Another way of asking this is, why can I not create an ISO of an audio CD? Such a file is possible with other indexed media, eg DVD. THANKS.

Why are cuesheets needed for ripping audio?

Reply #1
An ISO image of a CD is considered quite cumbersome. Often at HA, when one refers to an image, they mean a *-image, where * is FLAC, APE, WV, MP3, etc, etc. This then contains all necessary time and track data to reburn the CD, and in almost all cases is much smaller than the ISO image. Unless using FLAC (as far as I know), extraneous data on the CD is not preserved because (in my opinion) that is not an immediate goal of this website. HA is about audio first... anything else second.
OP can't edit initial post when a solution is determined  :'-(

Why are cuesheets needed for ripping audio?

Reply #2
Quote
I understand the purpose of cuesheets used with ripped audio. But I have been trying to understand why cuesheets are required when making an image of an audio CD. Isn't a CD image a sequence of bits which can be saved as a file on a hard drive, with all the track information and audio information intact?


The PCM data is RAW data, and two standards of uncompressed containers are WAV and AIFF. These containers can't hold metadata such as tagging and track indexes in the way we want. WAV might have some metadata but I don't think it has anything to do with track indexing and tagging. That's when the cuesheets come in.

Notice that compressed images like FLAC or WVPACK can hold/create cuesheets internally so they are stored inside the metadata blocks of the file, track indexing and tags.

Quote
Another way of asking this is, why can I not create an ISO of an audio CD? Such a file is possible with other indexed media, eg DVD. THANKS.


Because the plain Audio CD is not a "ISO" filesystem. Data media is commonly burned as ISO9660/UDF/Joliet usually combining these three file-system formats for compatibility. DVD-V is different from CDDA. When you burn WAV files to a CD, they're not going to be "WAV", they're going to be the streaming PCM data that will be read by the CD Player. And I think the DVD media is primarely a data media (UDF) - but someone can correct me in here, if I am mistaken.

Why are cuesheets needed for ripping audio?

Reply #3
Thank you SamHain86 and MiD30s for your quick and concise and knowledgable replies. I understand it much better now.