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Single-file albums and CUE sheets

Some albums arrive as one long audio file plus a small text file saying where each track begins. Vesari Stylus reads that text file and gives you the separate tracks.

One file, a real track list

A .cue sheet is a plain text index beside a single large audio file, usually a whole disc saved as one FLAC or WAV, marking where each track starts. When a folder is scanned, any .cue in it is parsed and every audio track it marks becomes an entry in your library.

• Track boundaries. Each track runs from its own start point to the next one's; the last runs to the end of the audio file.
• Titles and artists come from the per-track lines; album title and album artist from the album-level lines at the top. A track with no artist of its own takes the album artist.
• Year and genre arrive blank. Some rippers park those in the sheet's optional REM lines, which are preserved but not read.
• Data tracks are skipped, so a mixed-mode or Enhanced CD image adds no zero-length junk.
• Sheets listing one file per track work too, the shape of "gaps appended" rips.

Sheets are re-read on every scan, so a .cue you edit outside the app is picked up by the next Rescan Library, and boundaries that no longer exist are cleared out then. See How scanning works.

The big file stays out of the way

Once a sheet has produced its tracks, the container file is hidden from browsing lists. Listing it too would show the album twice: once split properly, once as one untagged multi-hour "song". It still backs every track and is never deleted, though a Library Health card that counted it still shows it.

The seek bar on a virtual track

Elapsed time, total time and the handle are all measured from the start of the track you are hearing, not the whole file. Drop the handle where you like and playback lands there, inside that track's boundaries; at the segment's end point playback moves on.

Boundaries inside a CUE album take the same gapless path as any other album: when the next track is knowable in advance it is prepared before the current one ends, so the stream carries straight on. Shuffling by track, repeat-one and automatic advance switched off leave the next track unknowable, so those boundaries fall back to an ordinary track change. Gapless, ReplayGain & CUE sheets has the detail. Times that looked wrong on tracks after the first were a defect, since corrected: see The seek bar or track time looks wrong.

Fixing the titles

A CUE track has no file of its own, so tags cannot be written into it and the ordinary tag-editing route is off. Edit the sheet instead:

1. Right-click a single CUE track and choose Edit CUE Tags.
2. The Edit CUE sheet window opens with Album title, Album artist, and one row per track with Title and Artist.
3. Correct what you need, then press Save .cue.

The sheet is rewritten in place, keeping the lines you did not touch. Per-track titles and artists land in your library straight away; album title and album artist go into the sheet but reach the library on the next Rescan Library.

Two saves are refused, to avoid writing a title onto the wrong track: one where the .cue changed on disk since you opened it (close and reopen the window), and one where the sheet holds two entries for a single track block, usually a duplicated index line (fix that in a text editor first).

Super-Tag still works here: it extracts the segment, identifies it by acoustic fingerprint, and stores the match in your library rather than a file.

The encoding pitfall

A .cue carries no record of how its text was encoded, and the two encodings in circulation disagree exactly where it hurts: modern taggers write UTF-8, older Windows rippers write Windows-1252, and read the wrong way a curly apostrophe comes out as a box or a stray symbol. Vesari Stylus takes a valid UTF-8 sheet as written, reads anything else as Windows-1252, and repairs titles an older tool already scrambled. Saving from the editor rewrites the sheet as UTF-8, settling it.

The line naming the audio file gets extra care, since getting it wrong costs the whole album, not one character. The literal name is tried first, a repaired spelling only if nothing is there; if neither resolves to a real file, no tracks are created and the album does not appear at all. So if a single-file album is missing after a scan, check the .cue's FILE line against the audio file name. The audio must also sit in the sheet's folder or below it.

What a CUE track cannot do

• No .lrc sidecar. That export writes one file per track, and these share one. See Lyrics.
• No remote streaming. A remote device asking for a CUE track is told the format is unsupported: there is no file to send. See Stream your library to your phone.
• No individual duplicate handling. Dedup and quarantine act on files.

Still not right?

If an album with a .cue still comes out wrong, use the in-app option to report a problem, quoting its FILE line and what you see instead. Is this a bug? How to report it has the rest.

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