Cuesheet Processor

Cuesheet Processor (CueProc)

Introduction
Cuesheet Processor (CueProc) is a command-line tool for converting audio CD images into another format such as WAV, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, MP4, MPC, WMA, etc.

The functions of this tool can be summarized as follows:

• Parse a cuesheet (a .cue or audio file with the cuesheet embedded). Field values in a cuesheet (e.g., TITLE, PERFORMER, REM DATE, etc) will be used by the latter job.
• Read audio data in a CD image (supported format:

FLAC, Monkey's Audio, WavPack, and WAVE).

Extract tracks in a CD image to individual WAVE files.

Execute an external encoder with predefined command-line arguments for each track.

CueProc sets appropriate command-line arguments (e.g., naming for output files, tagging, etc) automatically by specifying an output plugin

Execute an external encoder with configurable command-line arguments.

Send audio stream of each track to STDIN of the external encoder.

Enumerate cuesheets recursively under a directory.

Process multiple cuesheets at a time, which is useful for converting an audio collection into a lossy format.

Skip encoding when the corresponding output file exists, which is useful for converting new CD images only.

CueProc is the successor tool to

Audio CD Image Reader (ACDIR) and LAME with cuesheet input.

Audio CD image and cuesheet
An audio CD can be represented by an audio CD image that usually consists of a single audio file (e.g., CDImage.wav for an uncompressed image; CDImage.ape for an image compressed losslessly by Monkey's Audio) and cuesheet (e.g., CDImage.cue).

The portion of an audio file stores the audio data of the entire CD.

A cuesheet (e.g., CDImage.cue) describes a track layout and supplementary meta-data (e.g., CD-TEXT). Being free from C1/C2 errors and the ambiguity of pre-gaps, audio CD image is an ideal solution to archive audio CDs without quality loss.

An audio CD image can be generated by Exact Audio Copy with a menu item, "Action" - "Copy Image & Create CUE Sheet".

A number of CD writing software such as CDRWin, Nero, burnatonce can reproduce the original audio CD from an image.

Some software audio players such as foobar 2000 and Soud Player Lilith can play CD images.

A network audio solution, SqueezeBox combined with SlimServer, turns audio CD images in a HDD into a posh music jukebox with huge amount of CDs.

However, audio CD image is not suitable for portable audio players since the size per an image is far from portable (ca. 300-700MB). Thus, we need a method to convert audio CD images to another portable format, e.g., MP3, Ogg Vorbis, MP4.

Nowadays, a number of tools can perform this job:
foobar 2000
Sound Player Lilith
DAEMON Tools (IMHO it's too much to mount an CD image only to use Exact Audio Copy again for compressing )
Please consider these tools if you prefer GUI. If you want a command-line tool for this job, CueProc is what you've been looking for.