@danny I think there is still one key advantage to .CUE files (and old-school CDs for that matter) that Roon cannot replicate with a list of FLACs, and that has to do with handling “gaps”. I’m not talking about gapless playback (I understand that Roon’s playback engine is gapless) – rather I’m talking about the audio data that exists between the end of the last track and the beginning of the next track. The way the audio data is laid out on the CD, each track will have an Index 01 that points to the point in the audio stream where playback of the track should commence if you skip directly to the track. Depending on how the CD was mastered, however, there can be an additional Index 00 that contains audio data before the track begins. When listening to a CD, you would only hear this audio data when playing two contiguous tracks without interruption.
One use-case for these ‘pregaps’ is to add space between the songs. for instance, if you listen to track 1, then leave the audio playing, after track 1 ends track 2 might start with a 2 second ‘pregap’ of silence at index 00 before the actual track starts at index 01. When playing this ‘pregap’ data, a CD player would count up from -2, -1, 0 until Index 01 is reached and the song starts playing. if you were to skip the CD directly to track 2, playback would commence from index 01 and the silence in the ‘pregap’ would be ignored.
because this ‘pregap’ data is often silence, when splitting the CD into separate FLAC files, the ‘pregap’ audio data is most often appended to the previous track. If you play track 1, in our example, then a completely different track from a different album, track 1 would include the 2 seconds of silence from the pregap of track 2.
The issue I struggle with, however, is live albums. Often, the pre-gap contains actual audio data – the band engaging the audience, e.g. “this next track is…”. This audio data truly belongs at the beginning of the track, not at the end of the previous track. Index 00 points to the start of this ‘preamble’, and Index 01 points to the start of the actual song. If I want to just hear the song, I can skip directly to it, however if I am listening to the entire album, I hear this ‘preamble’ in sequence as intended. The problem, however, occurs when not listening to the entire album. I listen to a track, and then hear the band introduce the next track even though the next track is not in my playlist. Because the default behaviour of most audio rippers is to append the ‘pregap’ or ‘preamble’ audio data to the previous track, where it really does not belong.
What I enjoy about playback from .cue files is that I don’t have to be concerned about this issue at all. Players that use .cue files work exactly like the CD they are trying to emulate – if I listen to contiguous tracks I hear the “pregap” or “preamble” as intended, but if I skip between tracks (most often from different albums in a playlist) I don’t hear this data at all.
Roon has enough advantages that I live with this issue – it’s not a deal breaker. There are other software programs that handle .cue but I much prefer Roon. It sure would be awesome, though, if Roon could handle .cue files so that it could perfectly emulate the CD player’s behaviour on my ripped CDs. Perhaps this is not an issue with newer albums, mastering engineers will design the track layout for streaming and downloads.
The other factor, which you mentioned in your post, is that indeed some Roon members, myself included, have a fairly large number of albums ripped in this ‘legacy’ format. Currently I convert these to FLAC flies for consumption in Roon, but I would much rather Roon was able to import my archived CDs directly as single file .wav files & .cue file.
I realize we are likely a small minority, and this issue is a low priority for the team, but I did want to clarify that there are benefits to .cue files (and players than can utilize them) beyond just achieving ‘gapless’ playback.
