One file + CUE or separate tracks?

Posted by: AMA on 26 March 2014

I see some people keep albums in one *.flac or *.ape file with a *.cue file in the same folder.

 

The others keep all tracks separately with no *.cue.

 

Some people put a cover picture in the same folder (and call it folder.jpg or cover.jpg or front.jpg) -- the others embed it into tracks.

 

After many years of developing a streaming culture -- what is the forum wisdom on the optimal way of the hard drive albums architecture?

 

Any recommendations from Naim?

 

Would be great to summarise Pros and Cons.

Posted on: 27 March 2014 by Richheart

Having ripped close to 1,000 CD's to flac and cue (one file), I find various systems do not like the cue system.

On N-Stream my albums show up as if they are separate tracks but each listed track plays the whole album! So I get 12 tracks of 48:07 until I go nuts and hate the album I used to love.

My UQ2 will not recognise Ape files at all.

I am slowly transferring all my albums to single tracks (I use foobar).

The added advantage is that I can then transfer single tracks to a portable player, for playlists.

 

Now the cons:

Gapless playback. If you have a streamer/player that supports gap-less, no problem.

Otherwise DSotM is going to bring out your darker side

I know (logically) that flac is flac and lossless is lossless, I have this illogical fear that I am degrading the quality of the music by putting it through another conversion process.

Posted on: 27 March 2014 by Bart

I rip to separate tracks.  As Rich said, some systems don't support the one big file + cue system, so I just stick with separate tracks.  XLD for OS X is happy to separate out the one big file if need be.

Posted on: 27 March 2014 by Xenasys

Separate Tracks for me plus cover.jpg plus Dynamic Range Text and Icon

Posted on: 27 March 2014 by AMA

I spent several years in 2005-2006 to learn the simple rules of music lib management and after numerous mistakes and repeating exercises I finally came to below:

 

I use Foobar for compression to FLAC and tags editing 

 

I use FLAC-0 compression and not FLAC-5 by default

 

I keep all tracks in separate FLACs

 

I use the following album notations : "2010 - AlbumName"

 

I use the following track notation: "1 - TrackName.flac"

 

I keep album cover in "folder.jpg" file with < 100 Kb

 

I keep all other covers in "cover" sub-folder

 

I keep all additional info in "info" sub-folder

 

I  always use uPnP servers running from NAS (currently Twonky and Minimserver)

 

 

My major complain is Control Application (I'm using Linn Kinsky) -- I would like to edit the FLAC tags with Control Application, just like I do it with Foobar.