Create cue sheets, even retrieving track info from FreeDB, with CueMaster
CueMaster is a free and easy to use cue sheet creator. It can retrieve CD track info from FreeDB, or recover cuepoints from the MP3 file itself. Many download sites and P2P programs offer full CD’s in one big MP3 file, but finding the correct tracknames and lengths can take a lot of of time. This program allows you to find the CD on FreeDB.org and convert it straight into a cue sheet that can be used by musiCutter, CDRWIN or mp3cue. If FreeDB doesn’t have trackdata for the CD, you can try the unique MP3 scanning feature. It will automatically search through a large MP3 file to find split-points to recreate a new cue sheet. If possible, it can even extract cue sheets embedded in ID3v2 tags.
You can save the cue sheet to a .cue file or a .xmcd file. You can use musiCutter or Cue Splitter to divide the mp3 file into multiple parts using the .cue file, or burn a CD with correct track-markers. CueMaster can also export the tracklist to .xml, .html, .csv or .text file formats, and it can write the cue sheet to an ID3v2-tag inside an mp3 file.
You can use CueMaster as a full-featured cue sheet editor, to create a new cue sheet from scratch by adding tracks, to cut, copy, paste, delete and move tracks and edit the titles and durations. If you’ve downloaded all tracks from an album separately, and you want to glue them together with some join-tool, but you also want a matching cue sheet, you can use CueMaster to do it: it reads all MP3-files in a folder you specify, and creates a cue sheet with correct track-lengths. It calculates the FreeDB DiscID, so you can get the tracklist from FreeDB.
Note also this case, when you are not working with mp3 files, but with flac or ape. I needed the cue sheet for a flac file that contained the full album, in order to split it into separate tracks. Here is how I solved my problem. First I connected to the FreeDB with Cue Master and I retrieved track info for the album. Then CueMaster created a cue sheet with this info. I opened the cue sheet in the notepad and changed the name of the large file to the name of the flac file using the flac extension instead of mp3. That’s it! You only need to change manually a line in the resulting cue sheet, in order to use it with a flac or ape audio file. Cue Splitter is able to read this cue sheet and split the large file to separate flac or ape tracks!
