What This Tool Does
A CUE sheet is a plain-text index that tells CD-burning and splitting software where each track starts inside a single image file (or which per-track files belong to an album). Rippers like Exact Audio Copy (EAC), XLD, and whipper write one alongside your FLAC or WAV files. When the cue is wrong — missing INDEX 01, scrambled INDEX order, a UTF-16 byte-order mark from an old editor, or EAC's per-track FILE layout — burning, splitting, and strict players like foobar2000 may fail silently or produce glitched gaps.
This validator parses your cue entirely in the browser, runs structural checks against the CDRWIN/Hydrogenaudio conventions, and optionally compares INDEX math to real audio durations when you attach the album folder. Where a repair is unambiguous, the fixer produces a corrected UTF-8 cue you can copy or download, with a changelog listing every change.
Checks Performed
- Encoding / BOM — detects UTF-8, UTF-16 LE/BE; flags mojibake risk; exports normalized UTF-8 without BOM.
- INDEX rules — sequential 00–99; first index 0 or 1; required INDEX 01; monotonic times within each track and file.
- Pregaps / gaps — PREGAP must precede INDEX; INDEX 00 before 01 when both exist.
- TOC / tracks — sequential track numbers 1–99; duplicate or gap numbering flagged.
- FILE layout — path resolution, backslash normalization, single-image vs per-track FILE detection.
- EAC non-compliant layout — per-track FILE + appended-gap style warned; optional compliant rewrite.
- Audio cross-check — when a folder is attached: missing files, total duration vs cue length, per-track segment length.
What Gets Auto-Fixed
The fixer only applies safe, unambiguous repairs on single-file cue sheets: normalize path separators, renumber tracks when numbering has gaps or duplicates, insert missing INDEX 01 from INDEX 00, move misplaced PREGAP lines, and set the first INDEX in a file to 00:00:00. XLD and EAC multi-file cues are left unchanged unless you opt in to a strict single-FILE rewrite — those layouts are valid as-is. Issues that require human judgment stay in the report with fixable: no.
XLD / EAC Multi-File Cues
When each track has its own FLAC/WAV and gaps are appended to the previous track (INDEX 00 on track N, then FILE + INDEX 01 for track N’s file), the tool reports layout Multi-file EAC/XLD with an informational note. That is expected for rips from XLD and Exact Audio Copy — it is not a sign of a corrupt rip. Strict single-FILE CDRWIN parsers may reject this layout; foobar2000 with per-file tracks usually handles it fine.
Pair With Other Rip Tools
Use the Log Checksum Checker to verify your EAC/XLD rip log is authentic, the FLAC Integrity Verifier to confirm each FLAC's STREAMINFO MD5, and the Spectrogram Analyzer to spot transcodes — this cue tool completes the folder-level sanity check.