Sunday, September 2, 2007

Switching to Mac: Handling .cue + WAV images

I've been backing up my AudioCDs as 1 big WAV image file with a cuesheet file containing the track marks and title/artist info. I use this method in windows because one, I have many gapless CD mixes and this method preserve the gapless tracks, and secondly in Windows with the help of Daemon's Tools, I can simply mount the .cue file and Windows will think it's the actual AudioCD, allowing any CD-ripping programs to rip the tracks without any extra steps.

1 thing I found out in Mac OS X, there is no way to mount cuesheet associated with WAV files. I gave up and use my Windows PC to rip/encode MP3s. Then I stumble to this freeware called XLD. It doesn't mount cuesheets like Daemon Tools, but it recognized the content of the cuesheet, the associated WAV file, and the track marks info, and allow you to rip them into MP3s! Prefect! Even better, it uses Lame MP3, the best MP3 encoder out there. Ripping the tracks is very straightforward. Set the encoder (Lame, AAC, OGG, etc), set the folder path, open up the .cue file, click Decode, and let it go.

To complete my MP3 rips, I also found MacMP3gain, the Mac GUI for MP3gain. It's not as intuitive as the Windows version of MP3gain, but does the job.

Great! :) Now all I need is the equivalent of EAC for Mac OS X, and I probably won't need windows anymore. Can't wait to get the new iMac with Leopard.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow. Awesome. Nobody knows a tool like this even exists on the Mac from the number of posts I've seen online complaining about not being able to do this. Thanks for posting this. Any yes I know its a 3year old post you probably won't se. :)

Anonymous said...

Wow!!! I second that. Thanks for the tip!!