foobar2000 library: "*.flac; *.ape" vs "*.cue"

Question

In a huge and diverse music library there are albums of the following two types:

• Consisting of media files and a CUE file (most of the albums are of this type)
• Consisting of media files only

For various reasons, I prefer to work with the CUE files in foobar2000:

• they are quicker to process for the playlists and the library browser,
• sometimes the tags are available only in the CUE files and not in the media files they reference.

But, obviously, I cannot ignore the albums lacking the CUE files, so I have to use both media and the CUE file types for the foobar2000 library.

However, if I tell foobar2000 library to "Restrict file types to *.flac; *.ape; *.cue" it creates two albums in the library for the 1st type albums: one for the media file(s) and another one for the cuesheet.

Is there a way to tell foobar2000 to Use " *.flac; *.ape " only when no " *.cue" is available in the folder?

The closest solution I thought of was to standardize the library to always have a CUE for each and every album and then restrict the foobar2000 library to "Restrict file types to just *.cue".

I even wrote a Perl script to create the missing cuesheets for all the albums. However, I am yet to find an easy way to automatically populate the auto-created CUE's with the tags from the media files.

Answer 1

The m-TAGS component incidentally solves this problem because it creates a separate !.tags metadata file (separating metadata from data is ideal in the first place) for all kinds of configurations, including image and multi-track albums.

http://m-tags.org/foobar2000_component.html

I then made *.tags the only allowable file type in the Media Library "Restrict to" box, and FLAC/APE/whatever-per-disc image files no longer appear in playlists when I select folders in the Album List view.

Answer 2

I even wrote a Perl script to create the missing cuesheets for all the albums. However, I am yet to find an easy way to automatically populate the auto-created CUE's with the tags from the media files.

I wrote a script in Python 3 for the same purpose. It calls ffmpeg (ffprobe to be precise) to retrieve some of the metadata (title,artist,album,date,genre), which is probably what you want. https://gitlab.com/magicgoose/yet-another-.cue-generator-for-tracks
The part where ffprobe is called to retrieve tags: https://gitlab.com/magicgoose/yet-another-.cue-generator-for-tracks/blob/e65aace7d0f47ce30844107fb395175b26e0d5a8/tracks_cue_gen.py#L52-58
I think this can be considered fairly easy.

Unfortunately, I don't have any solution for the main question about changing foobar2000 behavior.