Cue Sheets. I've found a way to do it!

[Kurgan]

I've been doing a lot of hunting and reading, trying to figure out if this can be done from the user's end of things, without having to have new plugins created, and have made a couple of interesting discoveries.

First, you were absolutely correct regarding the ability to add cover shots to the ID3v2 tag, and I've since located multiple programs that plug-in to various players and allow you to see them while the album plays (my favorite is CD Art Display: http://closetosoftware.com/forum --works with several leading players, and even the dreaded i-Tunes). MP3Tag worked great, and I was able to add the covers exactly as you said, and a quick test proved that the archives remained stable and the tracks could still be extracted. Brilliant.

Ah, but then I found something very interesting! There's a program called MP3cue that allows users to play tracks from bundled MP3 albums. It's not perfect at this point, because it was created with lumped, single albums in mind, not actual archives with stored tracks. As it stands right now, for people using Make it One, we'd have to load the unpacked tracks into Winamp (I think it's been ported to some other programs and platforms, too), then manually add each track into MP3cue. The finished sheet can be saved, and once you've got it, you can add it to the ID3v2 tag so that you don't have to keep the extra file around (although that works, too).

Clearly this is beyond tedious for anyone that's already got a lot of MiO albums. However, since we now know that the function exists and works, all that really leaves is the need to be able to create the cue sheets from the albums. So, what I'd like to suggest would be the inclusion of an optional checkbox in Make it One that, if enabled, would also produce a standard cue sheet along with the album being created at the time. Users could then quickly add any cover shots and cue sheets to the MiO archive's ID3v2 tag using MP3Tag, and bingo, it's all done.

The other cool thing about this is the fact we're dealing with standard, universal cue sheets, which means any other media players out there that chose to enable the function (reading the data from the tag) could do so easily.

Here's the link to MP3cue, if you'd like to look at it: http://www.guerillasoft.co.uk/mp3cue/index.html

[makeitone]

hi Kurgan,

this is a very nice idea and not the first time that cue sheets have 'touched' MakeitOne. A while back tests were done to see if MakeitOne could be used to split a continuously ripped mp3 into its tracks by reading the cue sheet info. And it worked very well!!!

Cough, cough, until it was used on an Variable Bit Rate (VBR) mp3! With VBR mp3 we have a big issue. When the CD ripper application rips the CD it moves through the CD in a linear fashion, its knows where the tracks are and records the Time information into the cue sheet. When the cue sheet is read by the mp3 decoder (when burning back to CD) the mp3 decoder keeps track of what the Time is in the VBR file. So far sounds good, but... without decoding the mp3 as you read it, you never now the Time. MakeitOne does not do any form of decoding, MakeitOne deals with bytes.

So, your idea is guaranteed to work with Constant Bit Rate (CBR) mp3's, and (currently) doomed to work on VBR mp3's.

However, given some development time it might be possible to include some VBR header decoding routines into MakeitOne.

Watch this space - but not too closely its not going to happen soon.

[Kurgan]

Hiya,

What I'm suggesting isn't for creating a cue sheet from a compiled audio, per se. It might be better if I explained what we, as end-users, have to do currently, so you can see the "structure of the need."

Ok, when creating a cue sheet with/for MP3cue, you have to look at the original tracks first, and note their length (in time). Then you manually enter each track into MP3cue, but keeping the time a running total, beginning from 00:00 for Track 01, and so forth. For each entry, you'd maintain a +1 (second) offset, so each track listing would correspond to the beginning of the associated track. It's actually not that hard if you're able to see the list of tracks, with times, to work with.

Let's say we've got a few tracks, like so:

Track One 3:23
Track Two 2:27
Track Three 4:07

Ok, so what you'd do is create the cue sheet like this:

Track One 00:00
Track Two 03:24
Track Three 05:51
Track Four 09:58

And so on. Then, when that's all done, you save the cue sheet. MP3cue can either export it as a standalone cue sheet (which can be kept alongside the Album), or it can write it directly into the ID3v2 tag. From here on out, every time the Album is loaded into Winamp, XMSS, or any future media players that choose to support MP3cue or the function itself, the cue sheet will automatically appear in the window, just as if you'd opened a playlist. You can click the tracks and move to specific segments, etc.

Here's what a completed cue sheet for "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits_Album.mp3" would look like:

"MakeitOne's Greatest Hits_Album.cue":

TRACK 01 AUDIO
TITLE "Track One"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 00 00:00:00
TRACK 02 AUDIO
TITLE "Track Two"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 01801675122 02:23:00
TRACK 03 AUDIO
TITLE "Track Three"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 0537529679 06:03:00
TRACK 04 AUDIO
TITLE "Track Four"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 0537529648 08:01:00
TRACK 05 AUDIO
TITLE "Track Five"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 0875966769 10:22:00
TRACK 06 AUDIO
TITLE "Track Six"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 0542655812 13:48:00
TRACK 07 AUDIO
TITLE "Track Seven"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 0168632936 17:24:00
TRACK 08 AUDIO
TITLE "Track Eight"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 01715544608 21:14:00
TRACK 09 AUDIO
TITLE "Track Nine"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 01344282656 23:24:00
TRACK 10 AUDIO
TITLE "Track Ten"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 01280592212 24:35:00
TRACK 11 AUDIO
TITLE "Track Eleven"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 0537529648 28:34:00
TRACK 12 AUDIO
TITLE "Track Twelve"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 0909653045 31:38:00
TRACK 13 AUDIO
TITLE "Track Thirteen"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 01634562661 34:28:00
TRACK 14 AUDIO
TITLE "Track Fourteen"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 01164187555 42:19:00
TRACK 15 AUDIO
TITLE "Track Fifteen"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 0829617075 43:56:00
TRACK 16 AUDIO
TITLE "Track Sixteen"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 01179080427 46:25:00
TRACK 17 AUDIO
TITLE "Track Seventeen"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 0-1467938338 48:27:00
TRACK 18 AUDIO
TITLE "Track Eighteen"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 0-1653330619 50:02:00
TRACK 19 AUDIO
TITLE "Track Nineteen"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 01096271395 53:56:00
TRACK 20 AUDIO
TITLE "Track Twenty"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 01670355339 57:48:00
TRACK 21 AUDIO
TITLE "Track Twenty One"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 0-692813860 61:47:00
TRACK 22 AUDIO
TITLE "Track Twenty Two"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 00 65:24:00
TRACK 23 AUDIO
TITLE "Track Twenty Three"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 00 67:03:00
TRACK 24 AUDIO
TITLE "Track Twenty Four"
PERFORMER "MakeitOne's Greatest Hits"
INDEX 00 70:35:00

So, what I was suggesting (and apologies if I'm misunderstanding your last response, and this *was* what you were referring to) is that MiO's Album Maker "look" at the run-times of each track when they're dropped into the window, prior to making the finished Album, and if someone's enabled the new function, it would spit-out an associated cue sheet, based on the track times, along with the Album being made. This would save users all the time it takes to make them manually, and even if the results only worked properly with CBR compilations, that's still an awesome timesaver.