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What a cue sheet is for
A cue sheet is a small text file that describes the tracks inside one long audio file. Imagine you record a DJ set, a live concert, or an album as a single continuous file. Without a cue sheet, a player sees one track of, say, 70 minutes. With a cue sheet, the same file gains chapters: track one starts at 0:00, track two at 3:24, track three at 7:10, and so on. The player can jump between tracks, show titles, and burn a proper CD with correct track breaks.
Cue sheets are an old format, and that is their strength. Almost every serious audio player, CD burner and converter understands them, and the format is plain text, so you can read it, edit it, and fix it by hand. This generator turns a simple list of times and titles into a correct cue sheet file you can download, copy, or print, without learning the format’s strict spacing and keywords yourself.
How to use the generator
Enter the performer name, the album title, and the audio file name, for example album.wav or mix.flac. Then write the tracklist in the box, one track per line, with the start time first and the title after it, like “03:24 Main Song”. Times can be minutes and seconds, or hours, minutes and seconds for very long recordings. Press the generate button, and the cue sheet appears below. Copy it, or download it as a .cue file and save it next to your audio file with the same base name.
Check the first track carefully. It should almost always start at 00:00. If your recording has silence or talking before the first track, that intro becomes track one, or you trim the file first. Check the last track too: a cue sheet does not need an end time for the final track, because the player uses the end of the audio file. If a track start time is wrong by even a second, listeners will hear the previous track’s ending when they jump to it, so verify times against the recording before you share the file.
The cue sheet format, in plain words
A cue sheet starts with the performer and title of the whole recording, then a FILE line naming the audio file and its type, usually WAVE. After that, each track gets a TRACK line with its number and the word AUDIO, a TITLE line, a PERFORMER line, and an INDEX 01 line with the start time. Times in cue sheets use minutes, seconds and frames, with 75 frames per second, because that is how CD audio is addressed. A start of 3 minutes and 24 seconds is therefore written as 03:24:00.
Frames are the fiddly part. If a track starts halfway through a second, for example at 10.5 seconds, the frame value is 37, because half of 75 is 37.5, rounded down. This generator does that arithmetic for you. It also pads numbers with leading zeros, quotes titles, and numbers tracks from 01 upward, in order. Times are sorted, so even if you type the tracklist out of order, the output follows the recording order.
A worked example
Suppose your tracklist is: 00:00 Intro, 03:24 Main Song, 07:10 Outro. The generator produces a file naming the performer and album, then FILE “album.wav” WAVE, then TRACK 01 AUDIO with TITLE “Intro” and INDEX 01 00:00:00, TRACK 02 AUDIO with TITLE “Main Song” and INDEX 01 03:24:00, and TRACK 03 AUDIO with TITLE “Outro” and INDEX 01 07:10:00. Save that file as album.cue next to album.wav, open the audio file in a cue-aware player, and you should see three tracks with those titles and start times.
If a track title contains a quotation mark, the generator replaces it with an apostrophe, because a stray quote would break the format. If you need a different performer for one track, for example a guest artist, edit the downloaded file by hand and change that track’s PERFORMER line. The generator keeps the common case simple and leaves the rare case editable, which is the right trade-off for a plain-text format.
Limits to keep in mind
A cue sheet only describes track starts. It cannot split your audio file, change its sound, or add metadata to a streaming service. If you need separate audio files per track, use an audio editor or splitter after generating the cue sheet, or ask your distributor how it wants track files delivered. Streaming platforms generally do not accept cue sheets at all; they want one file per track, with metadata supplied through their own upload forms.
File names also matter. The FILE line must match your audio file’s name exactly, including its extension and capitalisation, or the player will report that it cannot find the file. Keep the .cue file in the same folder as the audio file, and avoid renaming one without renaming the other. Finally, verify the cue sheet in a player before you share it. A two-minute check saves your listeners from jumping into the middle of the wrong song.
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