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Topic: Foobar2000; CUE and RAR; RAR-archive and external CUE-file (Read 2268 times) previous topic - next topic
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Foobar2000; CUE and RAR; RAR-archive and external CUE-file

Hello my friends
Im trying pack media files to achives for exmple RAR without CUE, only media
All media is a some *.flacks WITHOUT tags, pics etc - its necessary
This rar-archive plays without problems, but where to get the tags?
Of course from the cue-file, but it is external file, not in archive

I have:
1) RAR-Archive with some tracks, all tracks without tags
2) External CUE-file for this RAR-archive with tags for this archive
3) How to make Foobar play tracks from archive and read tags from an external CUE?

Examples:
RAR-file named "test.rar"
This archive file contains two flacs: 001.flac, 002.flac

And I have CUE looks like this:
REM GENRE Genre
REM DATE 1980
FILE "test.rar" WAVE
  TRACK 01 AUDIO
    TITLE "Title 001"
    PERFORMER "Performer 001"
    INDEX 01 00:00:00
  TRACK 02 AUDIO
    TITLE "Title 002"
    PERFORMER "Performer 002"
    INDEX 01 00:00:00
Not worked

I try this:
FILE "test.rar\001.flac" WAVE
  TRACK 01 AUDIO
    TITLE "Title 001"
    PERFORMER "Performer 001"
    INDEX 01 00:00:00
Not worked too
etc

How to use RAR with external CUE?
Thanks

Re: Foobar2000; CUE and RAR; RAR-archive and external CUE-file

Reply #1 –
I'm struggling to see the benefit of archiving your flac files to rar, especially as I doubt you'll be able to use them anywhere other than foobar - assuming even that's possible.

If it isn't possible to use CUE with RAR files, and you say that foobar works with rar'd flac files, then maybe you could look into using External Tags; it would at least relieve you of the limited metadata support of CUE.


Re: Foobar2000; CUE and RAR; RAR-archive and external CUE-file

Reply #2 –
Quote from: SimBun on
I'm struggling to see the benefit of archiving your flac files to rar, especially as I doubt you'll be able to use them anywhere other than foobar - assuming even that's possible.

If it isn't possible to use CUE with RAR files, and you say that foobar works with rar'd flac files, then maybe you could look into using External Tags; it would at least relieve you of the limited metadata support of CUE.

Use of RAR is not considered
Technical support considered

But if you insist, then all your media files are working today, but not tomorrow
How are you going to restore them? Download again? And who told you that tomorrow you will find what you need?
And if you need it here and now, and what will you do?

There are so-called locally decentralized autonomous media centers without an internet connection, where 100% fault tolerance is implemented
It all works on local peer-to-peer servers, usually three servers, where copies of media data are stored
RAR-archive is quite satisfied as part of the implementation of fault tolerance
Archiving is not used for compression - this is nonsense
But archiving is used to encrypt and restore the archive if its damaged, as well as to PREverify the files being played
etc

By itself, the format of the current honey data always has one significant drawback
Checksums allow you to determine the fact of data corruption, but not to correct these corruptions

Re: Foobar2000; CUE and RAR; RAR-archive and external CUE-file

Reply #3 –
Use FLAC with embedded cue. Problem solved.

Re: Foobar2000; CUE and RAR; RAR-archive and external CUE-file

Reply #4 –
Quote from: Bogozo on
Use FLAC with embedded cue. Problem solved.
Thanks for your reply, but that's not the solution
Specified in advance - no tags can be embedded in the audio data
Audio data separated from tags
Audio data is immutable data, tags are mutable data
Please do not use workarounds [detours], this will not give you anything, sorry

Re: Foobar2000; CUE and RAR; RAR-archive and external CUE-file

Reply #5 –
Quote from: InterceptorTSK on
But if you insist, then all your media files are working today, but not tomorrow
How are you going to restore them? Download again? And who told you that tomorrow you will find what you need?
And if you need it here and now, and what will you do?
The rest of us store our music in a usable format and then take backups, restoring when necessary. I assume you're counting this peer to peer backup as one copy, and are keeping copies elsewhere too?

Good luck making your solution work for you, but to me it seems like the cost far outweighs the benefit.

Re: Foobar2000; CUE and RAR; RAR-archive and external CUE-file

Reply #6 –
As for a solution: have you tried foo_external_tags?

But this just looks weird:

Quote from: InterceptorTSK on
There are so-called locally decentralized autonomous media centers without an internet connection, where 100% fault tolerance is implemented
It all works on local peer-to-peer servers, usually three servers, where copies of media data are stored
RAR-archive is quite satisfied as part of the implementation of fault tolerance

Wait, are you saying that there is media server software working in the following way
* You got three servers for redundance, but still it requires each file to be a parity-tolerant archive in case the user should pull out a hex editor and change a single bit in one of them?
* It serves media as .rar files - encrypted .rar even, as per what you wrote next - and presumes that media players supports that nicely, opening encrypted .rar transparently?

Name? URL? And is it even possible for the .rar format to handle both encryption and single-bit corruption simultaneously?


I know one internet collection of certain bootlegs, where the curator argued for something like that. They use the TTA format, arguing that it doesn't support tags. (Outright wrong, TTA can have several sorts of conflicting tag junk, but apparently users don't know, as TTA is pretty much a dead format. The more sane reason to use TTA is that it has no compression settings so nobody will try to replace a file with a space-saving recompression.)
 

Re: Foobar2000; CUE and RAR; RAR-archive and external CUE-file

Reply #7 –
Quote from: Porcus on
And is it even possible for the .rar format to handle both encryption and single-bit corruption simultaneously?
Not just encryption and single-bit corruption
Multi-damage repair is supported, bit-shifting is supported in both directions, and all this and more is supported by RAR, see official documentation please, and test RAR functionality
Yes, this is reality) Try RAR, 2022 - are you surprised?
Evgeny Roshal wrote brilliant software, but no one uses it
What's the point in databases if they're not encrypted, if they're not self-repairing? Such bases are meaningless by definition
Encrypted standard disc 350mb containing several tracks encrypted uncompressed and damaged self-repairing by RAR mechanisms in 0.15 seconds on my server, yes - RAR really fastest
Such a repairing delay suits my sound engineer, because he needs media data here and now, he cannot wait, no one can wait) No one can wait for a neighboring server to give a copy of the data, this is a very big delay
etc
Sorry, I cannot discuss the details of RAR and building a fault-tolerant decentralized media center, because this is at least an offtopic

Re: Foobar2000; CUE and RAR; RAR-archive and external CUE-file

Reply #8 –
Quote from: Porcus on
As for a solution: have you tried foo_external_tags?
Of course i tried it
But I would like to have not software tools for launching tracks from archives, but launching these tracks directly from archives through ONLY external cue-files
Of course, cue-files are automatically generated by other means from my databases, and these cue-files are compiled by sound engineers, they can split and connect tracks as they need, and cue-files as a simple data storage format are also very suitable for this
there are a lot of them, something is constantly being done with the tracks and all changes are saved in a cue - it's very simple and convenient
In other words, no one touches the musical data, they are in unchangeable archives
But other data like tags, track duration, etc. - this changes very often and there are a huge number of these changes

Re: Foobar2000; CUE and RAR; RAR-archive and external CUE-file

Reply #9 –
Quote from: InterceptorTSK on
Of course i tried it
But I would like to have not software tools for launching tracks from archives, but launching these tracks directly from archives through ONLY external cue-files
?
How - and why - did you get the tags to "launch" the tracks?
foo_external_tags can save to tags file, to ADS (is that acceptable?), or just keep them in its own SQL database.

Quote from: InterceptorTSK on
track duration, etc. - this changes very often
Audio is supposedly immutable, but duration changes often?

Re: Foobar2000; CUE and RAR; RAR-archive and external CUE-file

Reply #10 –
Quote from: Porcus on
Audio is supposedly immutable, but duration changes often?
Yes)
We have a physical track in the archive
But who forbids repartitioning this track into other parts? These parts of the physical track are recorded in cue
Break the track into three parts - what's stopping you? This kind of cutting is sometimes needed, they are sent to the mixing console and mixed there
And this requires direct support for launching tracks from archives directly from a cue

Let's keep it simple
There are abstract data - and they are always immutable
This is the first programmer rule
But the representations of these abstract data are mutable
This is the second programmer rule)

Separate the data from the representation of this data
And data never ever touch

So here is the music data - it doesn't change
Moreover - these musical data are archived
Moreover - the rar-archive is blocked from changes, the rar functionality allows you to do this, and monitors the changes

So here is the representation of this musical data - these are the tracks, and they are mutable
Represent mutable data as you wish, represent it as tracks - this is cue

Re: Foobar2000; CUE and RAR; RAR-archive and external CUE-file

Reply #11 –
OK, a case for multiple separate .cue files to each .flac file.

Multimedia format authors have long understood that metadata is mutable even when you wish to keep the data chunk itself intact, which is the reason why you got separate metadata chunks. Even, most lossless formats - WavPack, Monkey's, OptimFROG and TAK - will recover the original .wav file bit by bit, not only the audio part; the .wav's metadata is kept secret and never altered.

Now of course, if you have multiple tagsets, then why not have multiple files pointing at the audio.


Quote from: InterceptorTSK on
Moreover - the rar-archive is blocked from changes, the rar functionality allows you to do this, and monitors the changes

Does not compute. Blocking users from altering files, that is done at file system permissions level. chmod a+rwx filename.rar, now what stops me from altering it?

Sure if you got a p2p system around, say BitTorrent or similar, it can scan files and transfer individual chunks to repair, if there is at least one seed - but that is file system and file type agnostic.

Re: Foobar2000; CUE and RAR; RAR-archive and external CUE-file

Reply #12 –
Quote from: Porcus on
Blocking users from altering files, that is done at file system permissions level. chmod a+rwx filename.rar, now what stops me from altering it?
Configured rar and launched from the kernel will stop you
No matter how you change file permissions and no matter how you make changes to archives - rar will fix all changes
Rar will not fix very deep damage to the archive, of course, and there is already p2p for this
p2p is the last line of defense

In fact, three servers are used not only as p2p, but also to capture and analyze the audio streams from neighboring servers
A very simple analysis shows whether the stream is damaged or not
All three servers are synchronized in time and the same audio stream is launched simultaneously on all three servers
and all three servers output the same audio stream to the mixing console
However, the mixing console has a buffer, that is, further on the air it gives a signal with a delay
this delay is also configured
Its needed so that the servers themselves determine which of them is not working and switch the mixing console to a working stream
This ensures that the mixer seamlessly switches from one broken incoming stream to another good one
This system is fault tolerant in every sense, like a Space Shuttle, with the difference that the Shuttle needed a person, but my system does not need
Difficult, very difficult)
Why else do you need computers? They have to work on their own, without a person
Now I need to add an archiving and self-repairing system to it all, it works faster than p2p, in case the archive is slightly damaged

Re: Foobar2000; CUE and RAR; RAR-archive and external CUE-file

Reply #13 –
Next steps

Test archive "test.rar" thrown into Foobar
Files in the archive "001.flac" and "002.flac" were successfully read and played, without tags of course, there are no tags

Point to the track, select "Properties" -> "Details" and see the full path, this is:
"...test.rar|001.flac"

Make a cue:
FILE "test.rar|001.flac" WAVE
   TRACK 01 AUDIO
     TITLE "Title 001"
     PERFORMER "Performer 001"
     INDEX 01 00:00:00

Run cue, doesn't work
Unable to open item for playback (Invalid path syntax)

Foobar used internal path syntax for rar, but does not see the same syntax from external cue