Embedded Cue sheet handling and compatibility with other software

2018-08-01 12:59:15

First of all, let me say that embedded cue sheets and tagging in general work well and are indeed some of the highlights in foobar2k for me. Recently, however, I've started working with KODI more and more as a media center and central hub for all my media. Foobar2k is still my goto software for my music collection but Kodi has its own merits.

Now, there is one thing in particular that doesn't work well across both softwares: Embedded Cue sheets and in particular multi-value tags. Kodi uses a single separator for multi-value fields which I've set to ";". Unfortunately, when working with single FLAC file rips of my CD collection (which I have done ages ago and which seemed a good idea at the time to perfectly preserve gaps and stuff), I have to use embedded cuesheets and there multi-value fields are separated by ",". In Kodi, this leads to weird results, obviously, like a single genre "Rock, Country", for example.

I've looked at the binary code of such FLAC files and noticed there are actually two types of tags. First, the one coming from the embedded cue sheet which looks like "GENRE Rock, Country" and a bit further down regular APEv2 tags like GENRE=Pop GENRE=Country.

Kodi seems to pick up only the first of these and then stops looking. This leads me to my question/request, if anything could be done to make this more compatible. My non-programming brain suggests this might be achieved either by substituting the comma separator by semi-colon separator transparently or maybe by moving the embedded cue sheet to the end of the file instead of the beginning.

Is there anything that could be done and more importantly, since foobar2000 is working well, basically, would someone be willing to implement such a change?

Re: Embedded Cue sheet handling and compatibility with other software

Reply #1 – 2018-08-01 21:23:20

I'm not familiar with how foobar handles embedded cue files, but the Masstagger component has an option "Split field by separator" that might be of use.

Re: Embedded Cue sheet handling and compatibility with other software

Reply #2 – 2018-08-02 00:32:50

I don't see how that would be relevant to my case.

Re: Embedded Cue sheet handling and compatibility with other software

Reply #3 – 2018-08-04 16:35:30

Cue doesn't support multivalue fields. So in cue it looks like one genre "Rock, Country". This is why fb2k writes them to tags. But Kodi, probably, only reads from cue.

Re: Embedded Cue sheet handling and compatibility with other software

Reply #4 – 2018-08-06 00:00:52

Thanks, hence my suggestions for possible improvement.

Re: Embedded Cue sheet handling and compatibility with other software

Reply #5 – 2019-04-26 13:51:26

I just want to clarify my initial request that it refers to EMBEDDED cue sheets (in flac files in my case) and the subsequent interal handling of multi-value fields like genre.

As was pointed out, cue sheets don't support multi-values. But when the cue sheets are embedded it would be ideal if those multi-values would be stored as vorbis comments (in flac), i.e separate values and not comma-separated and enumerated like in cue sheets.

Re: Embedded Cue sheet handling and compatibility with other software

Reply #6 – 2019-05-15 21:01:44

I haven't tried it yet... is it possible to convert a complete layer from a SACD ISO to single wavpack with embedded cuesheets as tags from within foobar2000?

Re: Embedded Cue sheet handling and compatibility with other software

Reply #7 – 2019-05-17 03:08:29

Probably not, as foobar2000 only supports processing and converting PCM.