Naming cue points

GoldWave general discussions and community help
Post Reply
TinPanFan
Posts: 49
Joined: Mon Feb 07, 2005 1:48 am
Location: Texas

Naming cue points

Post by TinPanFan »

Reading the manual on cue points it's obvious that there's a ton of capability here. I couldn't find a reference to precisely the issue I'm interested in, so if anyone can help I'll be grateful.

I'm back to transferring vinyl to digital and doing quite well, considering. There's something that would help immensely if I can do it in Goldwave, and that is:

Naming cue points from a text file.

Example: Just digitized a 1976 Sergio Mendes and Brasil 77 disk with ten tracks. I now know how to process the file so that exactly ten cue points place themselves 0.5 sec before each track start. They are then called 1 through 10. Now I have to name them.

It would make the process like lightning if I could get an ASCII track list (easy from any one of several sources) then point the cue manager at the text and tell it to use that list for the cue names.

Any hope?

Edit: Further reading says that a Cue Point File can be used (Import) to automatically name the cue points. How does one acquire or create such a file for a given album?
GoldWave Inc.
Site Admin
Posts: 4372
Joined: Wed Mar 10, 2004 6:43 pm
Location: St. John's, NL
Contact:

Re: Naming cue points

Post by GoldWave Inc. »

To create a cue file, you'd use Tool | Cue Points, then choose the Export button. You can open that file in a text editor such as Notepad and copy/paste the titles and save the file. You'd then delete the cues in GoldWave and use the Import button to read the cues with the updated names.
TinPanFan
Posts: 49
Joined: Mon Feb 07, 2005 1:48 am
Location: Texas

Re: Naming cue points

Post by TinPanFan »

Thank you, Chris.

I've done just what you suggested and it works beautifully. Goldwave is a wonderful product.
DougA
Posts: 63
Joined: Fri Dec 28, 2007 2:01 pm

Re: Naming cue points

Post by DougA »

Another feature that might fit in well with what you're doing is in the "Options / Storage"
Under "Cue Points Storage" there's a check box for "Automatically import and export separate cue file"
If you activate this, whenever you open a file (even in batch mode) if there's a matching cue file, it's automatically loaded.
This even works for file types that can't internally store cue's.
So if you're manually inventing cue files, they will auto load.

Personally, I wish the "import" and "export" were two options, while I find the import really useful, I get a bunch of unneeded cue files for every other file I work on. Still, it's a great option.
Doug
TinPanFan
Posts: 49
Joined: Mon Feb 07, 2005 1:48 am
Location: Texas

Re: Naming cue points

Post by TinPanFan »

@DougA,

Useful info. In my case I was somehow hoping to find a repository of pre-made cuefiles for a given album - which shows how poorly I thought the thing through. There couldn't be any pre-made cue files for the particular file I'm working with because the timing couldn't possibly match my unique file's track starts. So, never mind about that.

It's just a little more work, but what I do now is:
  • Set cuepoints accurately in the large, whole-LP file.
  • Export that cuelist, then edit the song titles - usually twelve or fewer, so no big deal.
  • Import the edited cuelist, then split the large file into the now-named tracks.
Here's what you don't do, ever! (I did it just once.):

Export and edit the cuelist, then stupidly edit the big file prior to re-importing the cuefile. This guarantees that the split files' start-ends will all be offset in time.

Then you get to do it all over again.
DougA
Posts: 63
Joined: Fri Dec 28, 2007 2:01 pm

Re: Naming cue points

Post by DougA »

Hi, I went back and reread the thread from the opening post, and now reading your last steps, I'm wondering if we've all jumped a notch too far, right from the get go. If I understand your first and last posts correctly, you're ripping a disk into an audio file. Opening that with GW, locating the track breaks, setting cue points that you'll use to split the large file into tracks.
And your outstanding problem is, you want the cue's to have the track names in them for when you split the file.
Hence the create cue file, edit cue file, reload cue file.

Ok, but I gotta wonder, you are aware that you can update the cue name right after you create it ?

In case we missed that ... Just set the cue, then double click the little triangle, and edit the name as you want.
Or, since its clear you've found the Cue Points menu, where you initiate the 'split' function, it might be easier that while you're there, double click each cue entry and again, the same edit box will pop up where you can set the name. You could edit all the cue names, just like you'd be editing the external cue file.

So, unless I mis-understood something, you can "edit" the cue names directly in the Cue Points menu, just prior to splitting the file.
(do remember to save the updated file so you don't lose the changed cue names)

Another tip that you don't find until you take a deep dive into the help pages is you can also assign some special codes in the name field
I've made recordings that not only do I want to split into tracks, there's often "material" between the tracks that I want to edit out. Like applause or song intro's and other talking you don't want to always listen to.

Yes, you can laboriously mark and delete, or just set a cue at the beginning of a section to remove, then name it ]X[ or [-Exclude-] and from this point to the next cue will be skipped over when you split the file.

Speaking of deep dive into the help pages, do do that, hit the help button, Goldwave has some of the best documentation I've seen in a long long time. (and I've been reading documentation, long before there even were PC's)
Also, the really thoughtful help button takes you right to the relevant section, no searching.

Sorry if I got off on the wrong track, but thought it worth checking out just in case.
Doug
TinPanFan
Posts: 49
Joined: Mon Feb 07, 2005 1:48 am
Location: Texas

Re: Naming cue points

Post by TinPanFan »

@DougA,

No, you're not wrong, and I'm sure I was unclear with my explanation - although I think the latest one tells the right story.

Yeah, I'm aware of the various ways that cue points can be named and was trying to get around the necessity of individually typing the song titles to the track names - kind of like getting freedb or Gracenote to import song titles via cdplayer.ini when burning or ripping a CD. But cue points aren't like those other things and it seems clear that one way or another those titles will have to be typed - and it's not a big thing, since any given LP will have no more than twelve tracks, so it's no more than a five minutes' labor effort.

"you are aware that you can update the cue name right after you create it ?"

If you create the cuepoints manually, it would be reasonable to name each one as it's created, since it's open and ready for typing. But if you use autocue to land the cuepoints, it's much more efficient to edit the titles in the exported cuefile than to access the individual cuepoints in the large file to edit the track titles. There's not a huge amount of difference either way, but it's more efficient using the file.
Post Reply