Hi, I've just hand built a .cue file from freedb.org data to use as mp3+cue (mp3 is a single file DJ mix). Is there any software that exists to to this automatically (without having the original cd available), as it's a time consuming process that could easily be automated? Thanks in advance.
That would be handy. You could even just make a mail merge to do it you wouldn't need to build an app.
There's a few calculations to do on it, you need to convert the Track Frame Offset into time. Each frame is 1/75 second, so I wrote an excel formula that does this: =((<TrackFrameOffset>/75)-2)/60 and pasted the offsets into the cells in order to give me decimal minutes, then I just worked out the seconds roughly in my head as I was going. The -2 is to account for the 2 second gap at the start of the CD (1st track is listed as starting at 150 Frames). I don't think you can do those sort of calculations in a mail merge though....
I have made cue files before. I always used the track times. The info I have seen on freedb had times for each track. I am pretty sure it had both a start and stop time for each track. I do no use freedb much. It rarely has what I need. Even if freedb only had track time I would use those instead of doing my own calculations using frames. How did you count the frames? Maybe you are unfamiliar with mail merge. You normally use an Excel spread sheet or access as the data repository for the merge. Both do the math needed to make a cue. Now I have only made cues of existing albums. Maybe you were not doing that.
I got the frame times from the disc id data. This for example: http://www.freedb.org/freedb/newage/a10be40d I have used mail merge before but only in word, using an access db as data source. Form letters, directorys, etc. That was a few years ago though and I've never used it in the context of excel..... Not sure how I overlooked doing a cumulative add of the track times to come up with the timings, it's a much simpler solution than converting the frame times Anyway, I'll investigate excel's mail merge abilities and report back. Ta for the advice!
No you need to use word to mail merge. The datastore can be Excel or Access. I would build a spread sheet that you could paste in raw data then the spreadsheet would do the calculations. You might want to paste the title, time into a csv file with a text editor. Just put commas between the time and title then open it with Excel and they will be in seperate columns. Then you can cut and paste the whole column into your spread sheet. I think you could get something workable in less than an evening. After that you should be able to knock one out in a few minutes.
