February 08, 2007

CUE sheet + FLAC under Linux?

I'm writing this in English in the hope that this could be indexed by search engine since I believe this is a common problem under Linux.

I use Exact Audio Copy to archive my CD collection. For the sake to insure the integrity of the backups, I do not separate tracks, instead I always rip each of my CD to a single big lossless audio file. I would also create a cue sheet for each CD so I could easily play songs from different albums in foobar2000 on Windows.

However, things are different under Linux. I could play FLAC files on Linux (which is why I choose it in the first place), but no audio player on Linux has a decent support for CUE sheets so far. At least, not that I was aware of.

There is a relatively new package called CDemu, which acts like DAEMON tool on Windows. However, it's not going to work since no way a virtual CD/DVD emulator could understand the FLAC format. It got to be a built-in of the audio player to make it work. I might give XMMS mp3cue plug-in a second try later, however since XMMS2 is coming into the mainstream this doesn't seems very attractive anymore. I might try to write a CUE sheet plug-in for, say Rhythmbox or Totem, if I really can't find anything on the Internet.

The main reason why I still can't get rid of the Windows is the support of multimedia and gaming. Part of them is the same problem since the video/3D and audio support was really not that good. Now things are getting better because we have ALSA, DRI, Mesa, SDL and lots of other stuffs that I know nothing about. Let's just hope that they got standardized/ stabilized soon enough.