What the heck are .CUA? Learning EAC for FLAC rips via guide

[med007]

I am following the guides for EAC 1 b3

Setup Guide: http://blowfish.be/eac/Caaok/caaok-eac-1.html
Rip Guide: http://blowfish.be/eac/Caaok/caaok-eac-2.html

However, I am clueless to what CUE sheets or files are.

I tried reading this wikipedia article and it really didn't help much: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_sheet_(computing)

I tried googling it, no luck.

I'm on my 3rd CD now (making a bunch of FLAC files of my CDs).

However, I'd like to know more about this CUE file that I make every time while following the guides, and how does it relate to my playback in VLC?

Is it something about gapless playback? (I'm assuming this means no space between the tracks?)

I did notice that there was a pause with The Grateful Dead - Without A Net tracks when I think when you play the CD on an old school CD player (pre-computers) there was no pause between the tracks (given it was live album recording).

Can anyone enlighten me?

Thank you for your time,

I tried registering for the EAC forum, but the registration is in German, and even after navigating it with Google Translate, you have to wait for a moderator to approve you.

[med007]

No one rips CDs anymore?

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

I'm afraid not

[med007]

Bummer!

I really like to only rip CDs that I own given it is 100% legal. I refuse to pay any money to apple. I haven't decided if I will ever pay money to other online retailers at this point.

[med007]

Is VLC capable of gapless playback?

(I don't actually know what that means - just read about it here:
http://www.digital-inn.de/threads/what- ... lac.44487/

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

No, it's not able.

[CloudStalker]

Can anyone enlighten me?

Greetings, med007. It's CloudStalker to the rescue! Hopefully -_-

Basically, some tracks on some CDs have gaps in between them; a digital silence of sorts. The Cue sheet that EAC generates contains this information. So when you load the CUE sheet into an appropriate player that supports it, it will playback as though you were playing directly from the CD itself, gaps and all. So in a way, the playback is more accurate to the source CD.

By the way, if you want a second EAC guide for reference, CloudStalker just so happened to have made one for this forum a while ago.

How To Rip 1:1 Copies of Audio CDs Using Exact Audio Copy

Although a bit dated, much of the information there should still be releavent. Hope this helps.