Well, the discussion's certainly moved on since I posted my enquiry yesterday, and thanks for all your opinions.

What's certainly clear is that many people do get irritated at having to manually add tag information manually, and some sort of standard would be desirable to a lot of people.

I guess that as this board is primarily concerned with live concerts, and by extension, gapless audio, the need for .cue files is not often relevant, because an exact replica can be created just removing all gaps.

However, that is not often the case with non-live bootlegs, and it would be great if my media player could recognise them automatically. Despite the argument that database support is not pertinent to bootlegs, you'd be amazed at how many are picked up.

When I burnt a copy of the Purple Chick SMiLE CD, I had all the tracks with 0s pauses, with the exceptions of 6s pauses before parts 2 & 3, and slightly longer one before the "bonus tracks". I then turned this into an image and .cue file, and loaded it using Daemon tools. When I played the image on iTunes, it was instantly recognised as Purple Chick's SMiLE.

The point is, that bootleg people are a strange and obsessive lot, and even though there are only a small number of each title out there, people do take the time and trouble to submit information to databases.

I suppose there are many, many ways to get the tag information into your codec, and personally I prefer the .cue file and image combination, for guaranteed fidelity (I find that some media players create a very tiny pause between tracks, unless playing an image), but as it's been said, there are advantages and disadvantages between all the different .cue sheets that EAC provides.

The main thing is that this site seems like a great place to set standards as regards tagging or database support, so hopefully someone will come up with a solution that will remove the need for manual input of track data, and possibly come up with a future-proof way of preserving TOC integrity into the bargain. It would be great if some sort of standard was set here, that was adopted by some media players and databases.