Hi.

I'm pretty new to the worlds of Bittorrent and FLAC, so maybe someone could help answer this query.

Like most people here, I use EAC for ripping CD's, and in order to reconstruct copies exactly like the original, I generate a .cue sheet.

I have noticed that the torrents here do not tend to include any cue sheets, and so in order to listen to the CD's, I would tend to remove all between-track pauses, on the off-chance that some tracks segue together.

I recently downloaded Purple Chick's fantastic SMiLE reconstruction, using that method, and it worked fine because the tracks do generally fade into one another.

However, there are a couple of very good reasons why a .cue file should be included:

Firstly, given this site's admirable dedication to fidelity, it would seem consistent to allow members to reconstruct their CD's exactly as they were originally authored.

Secondly, and more importantly, given our increased reliance on databases to provide tags for the music we listen to, an exact copy of a disc will soon be essential to most listeners. Anyone who rips their files to MP3 in order to listen on a portable player will know the frustration of having to manually input tag information for countless files.

Unless the original between-track pauses are maintained, very often a CD or disc image goes unrecognised. This will become more of a problem in the near future as CD's become obsolete, and we all gradually move to hard-disc players for use with uncompressed and lossless files. It would not be a great stretch of the imagination to conclude that within the next five years, most of us will be listening to hard-drives on our hi-fis, that are totally reliant on online databases for track information.

Ideally, I would like to see all torrents replete with a .cue file, in order that FLAC files - once converted to WAV - could be loaded as images (using Daemon Tools, or other), or burnt as clones of the original CD's.

Does anyone else have any opinions on this, or am I completely missing some technical knowledge that would allow me to do what I'm discussing with the files already available to me?

Cheers,

Tim