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[chrisjj]

Anyone getting good results with .CUE files in MC11? Here I get problems inc.

 1 They don't appear on Drives & Devices
 2 Import to library doesn't work on a CUE track
 3 Player glitches when going from one track to the next.

Have I got some settings wrong? Or are CUE files just a feature not yet debugged in MC11?

Thanks.

[chrisjj]

> the official line is that only playback of cue files is supported.

Ah, OK, thanks.

> You can find a lot of useful info in the following thread...

Hmm... various opinions, I see e.g. "The support in .82 is excellent."

> Without the library integration that most of us took for granted
> in the beginning, I stopped using them.

I'll follow your lead on that. Thanks marko.

[hit_ny]

I have been using CUE files now, but it took a bit of experimenting etc. As a result i feel confident to import the many hundreds of cue albums into my library. But this is not as straight forward as with separate files. It needs to be broken down into small batches to be manageable.

I believe the internal library representation of CUE files is stable. They might do more work on the front end/user interface in the next version.

The one gotcha i would have to emphasize is that Remove or Fix broken links in the Import dialog has to be unchecked or you will lose all previously imported cue files.The reason apparently is that cue files don't physically exist, but they certainly do logically.

My workflow in summary when dealing with new stuff is as follows

• Drop cue file in PN. This is the only time the CUE file is needed. At this point its important that Update file when info changes in Options->General is untagged else you get an error message during tagging saying that MC cant find the file etc. This only applies when dealing with cue items.
• Analyse, Rate etc. Save the list in PN to an MPL file in the album's folder.
• Open a text editior and edit the path to the same as the final destination.
  
  -OR-
  
  If not comfortable editing mpls, get MC to do it instead. Add the Filename (Path) column to PN, and put the destination path in there. All the cue tracks will have red crosses in them. Ignore this, when you move the folder in explorer to the right position, all will be ok.
  
• Close MC (to flush its PN cache & explorer cache). You could delete the appropriate cache items manually using playlists that show the PN & explorer caches [See Database Location] but i find it quicker to just close/reopen.
• Move the directory to its final destination using explorer.
• Reopen MC and drop the mpl in PN (as a check) the edit went fine etc, If the ratings/AA info  etc are there. All is good. The previous step is necessary as the cache will show the cue items with the previous path.
• At this point import the directory into the library. Uncheck CUE file in import dialog. Instead get the already tagged, rated track info from the mpl. MPL files can save all tag attributes relating to tracks.

That's it. It gets quicker once you get used to it. But there is cetainly possiblilties to streamine the above process. Being able to drag folders with imported cue tracks and have those paths automatically updated would halve the work currently required.

Adding cue items which have the main mp3 already imported is more complicated. At the moment i'm still at the stage of just analysing the 1000s of tracks. I managed to get a long list of cue items from the tree display by using [Filename]=;

Since all cue entries have a ; appended to their file name, this will give a list of all cue items in child folders. If you set the display to recursive that is. THen the list gets added to PN and saved as an MPL, when i get time i load that mpl , rate analyse etc.

Once it's finally done, i just import the big mpl file and hopefully all cue albums are imported.

[chrisjj]

Thanks, but while MC can't play cue files without glitches, I don't think working around the import problems is going to get me far.

[hit_ny]

What glitches ?

i have my playback set to Gapless. There have been times where its skipped but i was not sure whether this was cos the drive was nearly ful or not. Else it has been fine so far.

[hit_ny]

A summary of Alex's findings over the many months in one place

It's lengthy as i prefer to listen/rate albums *before* importing into the library. If this is not a problem, one could import first, rate/analyse/tag. Then move the folder after. Of course if you never needed to move the directory, it would be easier still

Dragging to the destination is easier, but then the cue filepaths will have to be modified. I could not get the path edits to work consistantly within MC. It would work some times, other times not.  Sometimes i might need to restart MC more than once before the changes took. Since the album was already imported, i think there was a mismatch between cache and the library. Library has been edited to reflect new path, but cache thinks it's still in the previous place.

I gave up and stuck with the MPL way as it worked consistantly.

[hit_ny]

3 Player glitches when going from one track to the next.

I find at times there is a skip else not, can't find a pattern. It's more apparent with music with higher BPMs than with lower but still fleeting.

One way to verify this is whether the ouput is truly gapless or not.  Meaning that when Playback is set to Gapless, is MC splicing the ends of the tracks or actually playing cue files as if it's one big file ?

To simplify, use a mp3 with a cue of say 3-5 tracks.

- Make sure any DSP effects are removed so as not to influence playback. Also try with MC as the only app so as to minimise load.
- Convert the big mp3 to WAV.
- Drop the cue into PN and set Options->Playback->Audio->Output->Output Mode (set to Diskwriter) as one big file.
- Play the cue items in PN, should save playback to a file.

Compare the PN WAV file to that of the big mp3 and note the areas where tracks changeover. Ideally the two WAV files should be identical. If there is slight changes near the track ends, then it's possible that some splicing is taking place. 

The question to be answered is whether MC is aware it's playing a cue file and when Gapless playback is selected, does not splice the ends together as if they were separate files. The whole point of using CUE is to get around the gapless problem with mp3s.

I'm away from the desktop atm, but hopefuly some one can confirm whether this is the case or not.

[Alex B]

3 Player glitches when going from one track to the next.

I have never experienced this on my three completely different Media Center PCs.

I have currently 82 albums in cue format in my main library. Most of them are VBR MP3 (--preset extreme), but I have encoded some albums for testing purposes with Musepack and Vorbis codecs too.

My usual playback settings:

Switch tracks gapless, Do not play silence (leading and trailing), Album Gain & Internal Volume enabled.

I rarely bother to change them. For me, these settings seem to work well with all types of audio files.

[hit_ny]

That may be, but the test i outlined above will show definitively where the problem lies. The beauty of it is that you don't have to rely on listening, all that is output by MC is recorded. I might do this later if time permits. The same could be done with APL & APE too.

If MC plays back a WAV from the cue items, that is very close (preferably identical) to the original WAV.  Then the problem lies with the user. Sound card drivers etc or underpowered PC.

Just to be clear here, MC is supposed to be capable of sample perfect playback with CUE files. What i understand from this is that given a cue file, if i want to play back the 3rd item (say), MC will accurately seek out the point where the third track starts. This is not in question but rather how well it handles track changes during playback of consecutive cue tracks.

[Alex B]

I did a test.

I made two cue files for the same disk image MP3 file (LAME VBR).

Separate tracks:

Code: [Select]

PERFORMER "Artist"
TITLE "Album (separate tracks)"
FILE "CueTest.mp3" MP3
  TRACK 01 AUDIO
    TITLE "Tr1"
    PERFORMER "Artist"
    INDEX 00 00:00:00
    INDEX 01 00:00:32
  TRACK 02 AUDIO
    TITLE "Tr2"
    PERFORMER "Artist"
    INDEX 01 02:58:10
  TRACK 03 AUDIO
    TITLE "Tr3"
    PERFORMER "Artist"
    INDEX 01 10:39:50
  TRACK 04 AUDIO
    TITLE "Tr4"
    PERFORMER "Artist"
    INDEX 00 16:25:10
    INDEX 01 16:25:70
  TRACK 05 AUDIO
    TITLE "Tr5"
    PERFORMER "Artist"
    INDEX 00 24:29:02
    INDEX 01 24:29:65
  TRACK 06 AUDIO
    TITLE "Tr6"
    PERFORMER "Artist"
    INDEX 00 31:21:22
    INDEX 01 31:22:12


Single track:

Code: [Select]

PERFORMER "Artist"
TITLE "Album (single track)"
FILE "CueTest.mp3" MP3
  TRACK 01 AUDIO
    TITLE "Tr1"
    PERFORMER "Artist"
    INDEX 00 00:00:00
    INDEX 01 00:00:32


I played the files through the Disk Writer output without any DSP. The playback setting was plain "Gapless" (nothing else was selected).

MC showed the same start position for the both first tracks (426,666667-) in the Playback Range library field.

The resulting wave files were not identical. Here is the compare result made with the foo_bitcompare Foobar plug-in:

INFO (foo_bitcompare) : Comparing:
INFO (foo_bitcompare) : location: "file://D:\Test\DW\Disk Writer Output (separate tracks).wav" (0)
INFO (foo_bitcompare) : location: "file://D:\Test\DW\Disk Writer Output (single track).wav" (0)
INFO (foo_bitcompare) : first different sample found
INFO (foo_bitcompare) : differences found: 171708277 sample(s), starting at 177.7067 second(s), peak: 0.7769775 at 1510.309 second(s), 1ch
ERROR (foo_bitcompare) : Files have different length.

This is on the first track change:

starting at 177.7067 second(s)

However, I couldn't hear any difference.

Perhaps Matt could explain how this works.

[hit_ny]

Just to be clear you don't have  Do not play silence (leading and trailing) checked.

Are you saying that only  the first track changeover has a difference meaning the rest were fine ?

I suspect it might be at each changeover.

It would be great if the media editor shipped with MC could show differences between wav files. Might have to dig out cool edit.

[Alex B]

Just to be clear you don't have  Do not play silence (leading and trailing) checked.

Only "Gapless" was selected. No DSP at all, not even the Internal Volume.

Are you saying that only  the first track changeover has a difference meaning the rest were fine ?

I suspect it might be at each changeover.

No, as far as I understand foo_bitcompare found the files to be quite different starting from the first track change. If there is even a slightest timing error (say 1/44100 s) the rest of the files would naturally be different. According to the report these files had 171,708,277 different samples.

The total number of samples in these two files is:
94,291,968 + 94,291,966 = 188,583,934

The file made from the separate cue tracks is two samples longer. That is practically nothing (1/22050 s).