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Topic: How do I skip songs in a cue sheet? (Read 6971 times) previous topic - next topic
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How do I skip songs in a cue sheet?

I have a single-file FLAC with a cue sheet that indexes all tracks on it. That's fine but sometimes (most of the times) I'd rather skip the bonus (what I call "bogus") tracks. If I delete or REM out the bonus tracks, foobar2000 gives me, "Unable to seek to 2:31.955 (Unsupported format or corrupted file):" within a few seconds of starting to play the last track. So I can't even play the last track I want to keep. Occasionally I would like to skip some bonus tracks and play a bonus track or two. I have searched hard and long for a way to do this with the cue sheet but found no answer. I tried making a hidden track but it didn't work. None of the official documentation gives any detail about doing this. So is there a way to do what I want using just the cue sheet without altering the original FLAC (or APE or WAV) and without a foobar2000 plug-in? I'd like this to work with other players as well.


How do I skip songs in a cue sheet?

Reply #1
Just remove the tracks you don't want to play from playlist. Is that so complicated, or I misunderstood what you want to do?
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How do I skip songs in a cue sheet?

Reply #2
If I delete or REM out the bonus tracks, foobar2000 gives me {error}

Not sure why: I just loaded an album of FLAC tracks into foobar2000 (v1.1.16b2), created a cue sheet from it, deleted the sections in the cue for three random songs (one of which was the last track), and it launched in foobar2000 and played without those songs just fine.  No error on the new "last" song.

If you want to keep the original cue intact, I tried inserting "REM " in front of the lines for another track and that had the same effect as deleting it.  You have to REM-out every line related to the track like this:

Code: [Select]
REM FILE "09 - The Last Resort.flac" WAVE
REM   TRACK 09 AUDIO
REM     TITLE "The Last Resort"
REM     REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAIN -5.01 dB
REM     REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_PEAK 1.000000
REM     INDEX 01 00:00:00

(Well, I'm not sure you have to REM-out each of those lines, but it did work this way.)

How do I skip songs in a cue sheet?

Reply #3
A cue sheet's purpose is not to be a playlist, but a description of a CD's layout (track and index boundaries), and a holder for other info that one might need to make a more complete copy of the original disc. You can redefine the track boundaries, changing the size and number of tracks, but this won't change what or how much audio is in all the tracks together; the last track will always go all the way to the end of the audio. So, at best, you could omit some track boundaries so that you are unable to skip to the start of a particular song, but you can't make it so that the song won't actually be part of the nearest previous track.

Example:

Your FLAC has the disc's complete audio on it:

|_________________________________________|

The cue sheet says to divide it into tracks like this:

|___track 1___|___track 2___|___track 3___|

The closest you could get to "skipping" track 2 would be to divide it like this:

|___track 1_________________|___track 2___|

The former track 2's audio will still play, but it will be part of track 1 now. Maybe that's good enough for you, because it won't show up in the playlist as a separate track. But you still have to manually skip ahead to a new track when it starts playing.

If I were you, I'd just use a playlist, and leave the cue sheet alone unless there's something actually wrong with it.

How do I skip songs in a cue sheet?

Reply #4
A cue sheet's purpose is not to be a playlist, but a description of a CD's layout (track and index boundaries), and a holder for other info that one might need to make a more complete copy of the original disc.

If I were you, I'd just use a playlist, and leave the cue sheet alone unless there's something actually wrong with it.


Yeah, I can always make a new playlist from foobar2000 deleting unwanted tracks, but it would be nice to be able to have multiple cue sheets. I think hidden tracks might do what I want but I can't find any detailed documentation about them.


How do I skip songs in a cue sheet?

Reply #6
A cue sheet can't be made to ignore any part of the audio in the file(s) referenced by the cue sheet.

Audio at the beginning of the first file can be defined as HTOA (TRACK 01, INDEX 00), which will probably have the effect of it being ignored when the cue sheet is used as a playlist in foobar2000, but that's only good for audio at the beginning of the 'disc'.

"Hidden" tracks of the type most commonly found on CDs are not HTOA, just a designation of 2 songs and intervening silence as one long track. You can make a cue sheet that designates multiple songs as one track (like in my example), but this won't accomplish the goal of skipping anything.

How do I skip songs in a cue sheet?

Reply #7
Audio at the beginning of the first file can be defined as HTOA (TRACK 01, INDEX 00), which will probably have the effect of it being ignored when the cue sheet is used as a playlist in foobar2000, but that's only good for audio at the beginning of the 'disc'.


Yeah, that's all I could find out about it in EAC's documentation, which is the most detailed I have been able to find on the subject.

 

How do I skip songs in a cue sheet?

Reply #8
Yeah, I can always make a new playlist from foobar2000 deleting unwanted tracks, but it would be nice to be able to have multiple cue sheets. I think hidden tracks might do what I want but I can't find any detailed documentation about them.


N.B.

Only the proprietary foobar2000 .fpl type playlist works in this case. The .m3u type just adds a copy of the absolute location of the cue sheet for every song. So no portability here.