Mp3CueFuse Make your mp3/cue sheets files available to iTunes

Mac

Mp3CueFuse

A long time ago I ripped my entire CD collection to a bunch of mp3 files. I wanted to listen to my music on my laptop. However, I've got a lot of classical music and as I didn't want the annoying MP3 Gap during a track change while listing to e.g. a Mahler symphony, I decided to rip each CD to 1 single mp3 file, accompanies by a CUE Sheet.

I could have choosen to rip my CDs to a bunch of FLAC files, but FLAC format just takes too much space for me. So I choose a good quality mp3.

This works great with software like FooBar2000 on Windows. It didn't work that well on Linux, but these days, Clementine does have good support for cuesheets.

However, I've also got a Mac. It's a really nice machine, and it comes with iTunes. iTunes is a great product, but it just can't handle CUE Sheets. Here's where Mp3CueFuse comes in. Mp3CueFuse uses OSXFuse to make the MP3 + CUE Sheets available as a read only file system with .MP3 tracks! It presents CUE Sheet as directories and presents the tracks in the CUE Sheets as .MP3 files. Under the hood, it splits your mp3 files on the fly to mp3 tracks. The nice thing about it, is that iTunes analyses your tracks and provides gapless playback again. Now you can keep your cuesheet driven files and still play them on your mac. It you use e.g. EasyTag to add cover art to the original tracks, iTunes will import that too! This is the ideal situation to have your (classical or liveset) mp3 files playback gapless on Linux, Windows and Mac OSX and also be able to synchronize your tracks with all the iPod devices your children have.

Now everyone can import their MP3/CUE Sheets as .MP3 files in iTunes. It works great and provides seamless gapless playback. One thing to be aware of: You may not want iTunes to copy the .MP3 files to the library. So you need to tell iTunes not to copy imported files to the Music collection. Otherwise, you'll loose a lot of disk space to double .MP3 tracks.

Installation

For installation details, see this page on GitHub. Please note that this is BETA software. If your cuesheets are erroneous or there is a problem reading a file, the file system provider may crash. You then need to analyse what file is causing the trouble, fix this problem (tell me about it, so that I can make this software more robust) and remount the fuse filesystem using the application from the application menu.