This is a tool for manually creating cuesheet files using Excel.
download Excel cuesheet creator- - -
I've created it for the following reason:
I have several recordings of radio shows that are about an hour long and contain many different tracks.
They can e.g. be live recordings of studio performances, hour-long dj-mixes, etc.
Such a file will display in MusicBee as one single track, not allowing to see the different songs or select them.
You could split up the audio file into many, using an audio editor, but that will be quite some work, and if the source file contains lossy audio it could cause issues with gapless playback and/or degradation of the audio quality.
So I wondered if the use of cue files could be a solution.
But since I couldn't find any tool that seemed suited for this purpose
(let me know if you know of one), so I created an Excel sheet that can be used for creating such a cuesheet.
(edit, Bee-liever had a good tip for a nice tool)note 1:it should work with both older and recent versions of Excel, and with recent versions of LibreOffice's Calc.
(it will not work with Google Sheets)
note 2:it is intended for use within MusicBee, not for cd burning purposes.
It may work for that too, but I have not tested it.
For example I noticed that most cue sheets also have 'INDEX 00' for every track, which is used for pre-gap information.
But to be honest it is not clear to me what that does in practice when burning audio CDs using a cuesheet.
So input from users that use this tool to burn audio CDs on that will be welcome.
I'm wondering if this may perhaps also be useful for e.g. audiobooks?
It would make it possible to divide a whole book into chapters.
Or for instrument study purposes. You could divide a song into segments such as 'intro', 'verse', chorus', 'solo' etc. and then easily select or repeat such a part.
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Howto:1.Enter the basic album and file details:
2.Enter the artists and titles per track:
(such tracklists are often available in an accompanying text file or from websites, and can then simply be copied into the sheet)
(make sure you paste it into the sheet as plain unformatted text, per column)
3.Enter the duration of each track, or its position.
(you can toggle between the two using the green button)
update: you can now also toggle 'Audacity' mode, which uses imported timestamp labels
Note that if you have the track durations available, that can be a starting point, but since those are always rounded to a second, the higher the track number, the larger notable discrepencies in the position will become.
So after having entered the durations it will be good to switch to editing positions and make adjustments there. (using your ears)
4.When all's good, copy the content that is in the column 'cuesheet', and save it as a text file.
Then rename the text file to the exact same name as the audio file it refers to, and change the extension to .cue
That's it.After rescanning the audio file in MusicBee you should now have this:
instead of this:
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For Audacity users:I found that you can export the 'labels' (timestamps) that you have created for an audiotrack.
That proved to be very handy in combination with this cuesheet creator.
The Excel sheet now contains a second tab named 'Audacity label converter'.
It can transform the output of Audacity's timing labels to usable time positions for this sheet.
This is how that works:
1.In Audacity, mark the startpoints of songs/segments.
(default hotkeys for this are: [Ctrl]+B and [Ctrl]+M)When done, export/save them.
2.Open the saved text file, and select and copy its content.
3.Paste the content in cell B6 of the 'Audacity label converter' tab.
4.Return to the main tab and select 'Audacity' edit mode.
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embedding a cuesheet in an audio fileIt is also possible to embed a cuesheet in an audio file, so you don't need to have a separate accompanying .cue file in the same folder.
(this requires MusicBee v3.6.8884 or up)- select the audio file and open the Tag Inspector
- follow these steps:
- paste the contents of your cuesheet into the 'tag value' box:
- press 'Update', 'Save'
- rescan the file, and now MusicBee should show all the tracks as described in the cuesheet
