CUE File Format

So during this weekend's mad coding sessions, I needed to cut an MP3. As it turns out there are a number of programs to help you do this, and most of them give you the option of using either a .cue cuesheet, or CDDB to find the cut points, and supply the meta data for the new MP3s' ID3 tags

As CUE files are a nice plain text format, and CDDB files are hairy I decided to go with the cuesheet, even though there was a CPAN Module to handle the hairyness of CDDB.

Unfortunately there is no spec for .CUE files that I could find. The closest I could find was the formats.txt in the docs for the cuetools project. This is helpful, but certainly not a true spec.

What I found by looking through the source of a number of projects is that the spec, or rather nonspec, is implemented differently. The format appears to have semantic white space, but at least one implementation I read determined things solely by file positions. Other pieces of code were very picky about the # of spaces. There are a number of common tags, perhaps standard, that are simply not handled by this piece of software or that. Also people seem to have no problem just adding their own tags for their own usage pretty much for the heck of it. So the source is pretty much the only way you know if something is handled.

To make this more interesting this format was originally used to burn CDs and those implementations are reportedly picky. And have no use for all of the MP3/ID3 tags based tomfoolery described above.

On the whole I wish I'd used the CPAN module and the hairy format.

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