mpd playlists and "single music file" album cuesheet data

moogtrain · 2014-03-14 10:45:53

Many albums out there come in the form of a giant FLAC file with a cuesheet defining the location and duration of each track in the album. mpd is able to load cuesheets properly but it cannot save the individual track entries into mpd's own playlist. It simply saves the path to the FLAC file without including any track info. From what I can gather, this is a limitation of the m3u playlist format that mpd uses for its internal playlists. Both adding the path to the cuesheet file into the m3u and putting a copy of the cuesheet to mpd's playlist folder don't work as well. Is there a way around this on mpd other than splitting up the FLAC file manually or is someone already working on a solution to this?

Last edited by moogtrain (2014-03-14 10:47:44)

Rasi · 2014-03-15 08:01:43

i havent understood this question at all... did you mean that mpd does not store track informations in its database? or that you cannot save individual tracks in playlists?
If so: yes, both is not possible and there actually is no playlist format out there that could do this (well, streaming playlist formats could, but that's a different beast)
Since cue files are not even added to mpds database (neither are the contents of linked flac files) there is absolutely no way to access individual tracks with mpd without loading the whole album beforehand.

and apart from that.. single track releases should die. their only purpose is to satisfy the minds of those that want a perfect reproduction of the actual physical disc - totally ignoring the fact that digital files - well - are no physical discs
There are lots of drawbacks and not a single advantage.

attention: rant following

- most players cannot handle cues.
- zero hardware support.
- track info is lost, when you lose the cue fille.
- this could be solved with internal cuesheets (in tags) which is even worse supported than external ones.
- non-standardized format (lots of cue formats out there)
- slow (seeking big files takes much more time)
- want to share a song quickly? well, you can't - only full albums.
all this just to tell yourself "I have a perfect copy and can always reproduce my original disc" (which isn't even true)

in short: I would just split them. mpd's support for cue files is crap and will be crap in future since the dev does not use cues at all. Support in other players isn't much better.

Last edited by Rasi (2014-03-15 08:44:43)

ConnorBehan · 2014-03-16 06:51:32

I also split such files. The cuetools package lets you do it painlessly.

Arch Linux

#1 2014-03-14 10:45:53

mpd playlists and "single music file" album cuesheet data

#2 2014-03-15 08:01:43

Re: mpd playlists and "single music file" album cuesheet data

#3 2014-03-16 06:51:32

Re: mpd playlists and "single music file" album cuesheet data

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