4. Cue Sheet
The cue sheet is a necessary tool if you want to be able to burn a perfect copy of the original CD from your ripped files. It is used for "telling" a CD burner how to structure the files in the same way as they were on the original retail CD (and for other metadata information).
- Click "Create CUE Sheet... Multiple WAV Files With Gaps... (Noncompliant)" in the Action menu.
Note that if you have set a standard directory for extraction in the EAC Options/Directories tab, you will not be asked where to save the cue file. EAC will save it to this directory without confirmation.
It is very important that you choose the noncompliant option - the other kinds of cue sheet would not be of much use for the kind of rip you are about to make. (See Appendix D: Cue Sheets.)
Read more about how different gap settings relate to different kinds of cue sheet here.
- Also, while you are looking at this menu: confirm that "Append Gaps To Previous Track (default)" is checked. Do not touch it - leave it checked! The noncompliant cue sheet you are just about to create is designed to go with this kind of gap handling.
I recommend creating the cue sheet before you start actually ripping the CD, but fact is that you can create a cue sheet for a CD at any time. Just load the CD in EAC, and click "Action - Create CUE Sheet... Multiple WAV Files With Gaps... (Noncompliant)". EAC will automatically detect gaps before creating the cue sheet, if gaps have not already been detected during the session.
Even if gaps have already been detected, EAC may start a new round of detecting before it creates the cue sheet. This will happen if it needs to add entries for "INDEX 02" and above for some tracks. Such indices can be utilized by some players for skipping to sections within the track.
If you have the log file for separate tracks ripped with EAC 0.99, you can create a cue sheet from that information. A simple way of doing this is to use the online "Log to Cue" tool at The EAC Helper web page. Note that, in order to have correct gaps in the new cue sheet, the gaps need to be shown in the log. In other words, the gaps must have been detected before ripping as shown in 3. Detect Gaps.