How do I mount a .cue/.wav

Question

I have a .cue file which points to a .flac

How can I mount the image as if it were an audio CD? Is it necessary to decode the .flac file into .wav and edit the cue sheet to point to a .wav file instead (it currently points to the flac)?

I want to use abcde to split, tag, and encode the audio.

Answers I've found on here already discuss .cue/.bin combo, not audio images..

Solution

You don't. You either burn the CUE/FLAC combination in a burner that can decode the FLAC data or you play it in something that understands what CUEs are (lots of players AFAIK).

A CUE/FLAC is very much like an audio CD. An audio CD is just linear PCM data with a CDA-formatted header that states where all the track boundaries are. In your case the audio data has been losslessly compressed into the FLAC and the CUE is the track information.

Converting to WAV only serves to undo the compression. You might need to do this to burn it to disk.

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Splitting into separate tracks

If you want to split the main FLAC into separate tracks, you can use the tools from the shntool package as suggested in this blog:

cuebreakpoints filename.cue | shntool split -o flac filename.flac

You can also specify another output format instead of FLAC (option -o flac in the example).

(You'll need to install the commands first: sudo apt-get install cuetools shntool)

Tagging FLAC CD images for use with players like foobar

FLAC also allows for embedding cuesheets via metaflac and compatible taggers. Players like foobar2000 and it's Linux equivalents (DeaDBeeF and Guayadeque) can parse and play files with such metadata. Importing a properly tagged cuesheet (along with other metadata like pictures), will also import tags like individual tracknames, tracknumbers, artist and album tags.

Excerpt from metaflac manpage:

--import-cuesheet-from=file
    Import  a cuesheet from a file.  Use '-' for stdin.  Only one
    FLAC file may be specified.  A seekpoint will  be  added  for
    each  index  point  in  the  cuesheet to the SEEKTABLE unless
    --no-cued-seekpoints is specified.

But this kind of file format is rather unknown and unsupported outside the "distributed CD backup community". Mostly due to the fact that you cannot rip CDs to images on Linux like EAC does on Windows. (With EAC doing something very odd in this case, as I later learned.)

Comments

[andrew.46]

Does the flac have an embedded cue file? Easy enough to use with abcde if this is the case...

[wim]

Are you saying there is no way to mount it as an image? Because I can do this in my WinXP virtualbox using a software called Alcohol 120, and then I can use EAC to encode from the virtual drive. I was hoping for a linux equivalent.

[Oli]

What I'm saying is I don't see the value in what you suggest. You have a lossless rip and a set if guides (the CUE) so just split it up. If you want to transcode the resulting FLACs to something lossy, that's fine too.

[wim]

the problem with splitting up the tracks and then encoding them is that it makes tagging harder, if i were able to mount it as an image then i could easily use freedb or other to automatically get that stuff. i don't know how to do that easily after splitting.

[Oli]

I know EasyTAG can do this with separate tracks. Hand it a selection of audio files in order, it looks at the number of tracks and their lengths and comes back with perfect metadata.

[wim]

thanks, i was able to do what i wanted this time with easytag. i usually prefer command line for these sort of tasks though!

[J. Bruni]

Of course, after getting the WAV files, you will need a CD burner (like Brasero) to have the ISO image...