Archive for 2005-11-12

Cue sheets (those small text files with .cue extension) was not very popular under Linux (and all Unices), but it was popular among Windows users. Yes, flac has cuesheet support (with the cuesheet embedded inside flac metadata block), and mplayer has it too (though very buggy) — but that’s it. All other tools are just cue sheet manipulation tools, not media players supporting cue sheet natively.

To add more trouble to this mess, cue sheet syntax has never been documented well enough. So far the best (and authorative) reference is appendix A from cdrwin’s user guide. (Too bad that Golden Hawk doesn’t allow people to download its document anymore.) However this reference is not released openly. Various other information about cuesheet syntax scattered around the net, including this link and this one. I’m not quite sure why wikipedia made no attempt to document it. Probably so-called IP again? I don’t think this can be considered as private info, since so many media players and CD remastering programs are implementing cuesheet support (especially Windoze ones), and apparently Golden Hawk has not asked anybody for license fee for supporting cuesheet.

Cue sheet spec has some problems:

• Since it is originated from Windows programs, no effort is spent on how to manipulate files under other platforms (Unix, Mac etc), nor does it discuss issues on other platforms.
• It just say cue sheets are text files. But in which text encoding? I have personally seen cue sheets in GB2312 (simplified Chinese) encoding, which is rendered as garbled text on my machine. Yet another “English is the only language in the world” bastard. Why can’t people spend some time to think about how their products are used on other places in the world?
• Some of the cuesheet commands are not as well documented as they should be, e.g. CDTEXTFILE and FILE. Where should they occur? For how many times?

But regardless of the problems, cuesheet is still a very popular way of specifying CD metadata; probably it’s not popular among Linux users simply because the origin is from Windows.