Read a .cue file as a plain timestamped list
A .cue file is plain text. You can open one in any editor and read it: a short run of commands, one per line, naming the audio it describes, the tracks inside it and the point each begins. Nothing in it is binary and nothing is compressed, which is why a cue sheet survives being zipped, emailed and copied between machines with its timings intact.
What it is not is readable the way a tracklist is. The times are written in a format that looks like minutes, seconds and hundredths and is not, and there are no track lengths in it. Drop one here and it comes back as a list you can paste — read in your browser, with nothing uploaded.
Drop your project or session file here
Ableton .als, FL Studio .flp, rekordbox .cue, Traktor .nml or Serato .session.
Your file is read in this browser tab. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.
No file to hand?
Run a real mix through it and see exactly what comes out. A twelve-track recording running an hour and a quarter.
On your phone?
Your project file is probably on another computer. Send yourself the link and pick this up there.
What you get back
A list ready to paste into a YouTube, SoundCloud or Mixcloud description.
0:00 Kestrel Lane - First Light 6:12 Ardent Fields - Paper Harbour 13:15 Nomi Vale - Slow Transit 19:48 The Quiet Wire - Understory
What is actually inside the file
Every line opens with a command word. FILE names the audio the sheet describes. TRACK begins a numbered entry, and the TITLE and PERFORMER lines under it belong to it. INDEX gives the position: INDEX 01 is where the track proper starts, and an INDEX 00 before it marks a pregap, the run-in a CD player skips when you jump to the track.
TITLE and PERFORMER before the first TRACK mean something else: the album and the album artist rather than a track, which is why a sheet can look like it holds one more entry than it does. Lines beginning REM are comments, and both DJ software and rippers use them to stash extras — a date, a genre, a ReplayGain figure — that no reader has to understand.
Encoding is the one part of a cue sheet that is not plain. No field in it declares which encoding was used, so a sheet carrying accented names might be UTF-8, UTF-16 or a legacy single-byte set, and the reader has to infer it from the bytes. When the guess here falls back to the legacy reading, the result says so, because that is where an accented name can come back wrong.
The third field is frames, not hundredths
INDEX times are written MM:SS:FF, and FF is CD frames — seventy-five to the second, the smallest unit an audio CD can be addressed at. So 01:30:37 is one minute, thirty seconds and thirty-seven seventy-fifths: 90.49 seconds, near enough one minute thirty and a half. Read as hundredths it would be 90.37. That near-miss is what makes the mistake durable: the two readings never differ by more than about a quarter of a second, so the wrong one looks plausible.
There is a tell. Frames run 00 to 74, so a third field of 75 or higher cannot be a legal frame count. If the file in front of you reaches into the eighties or nineties, something wrote hundredths into a frames field, and those are not cue times whatever the extension says.
The minutes field holds the other surprise. It is not capped at fifty-nine, and there is no hours field to roll into, because the format counts minutes elapsed from the start of the audio rather than telling the time. A two-hour recording legitimately reads 122:15:00. Readers that expect two digits, or a range of 00 to 59, either refuse it or fold the second hour onto the first. Only the seconds field genuinely stops at fifty-nine.
Cue sheets from CD rippers, and the multi-file case
The format predates DJ software by a long way. Exact Audio Copy, CDRWIN and Nero all write cue sheets, because a sheet is how a disc's track boundaries survive once the disc has become one long audio file. They read exactly like a sheet from a DJ recorder, and nothing here cares which program wrote it.
One shape behaves differently, and it comes almost entirely from rippers. If the disc was ripped to one file per track, the sheet carries a FILE line for every track, and each INDEX is a position inside its own file rather than inside a continuous recording. Nearly all of them read 00:00:00, so a naive conversion puts every entry at zero.
So when a sheet references more than one audio file you are told, with the count, rather than handed a quietly meaningless list. Repairing it would mean adding up the length of everything before each file, which needs the audio: durations are precisely what a cue sheet does not carry. A single-file rip, or a DJ recording, is one FILE and many INDEX lines, and needs none of that.
What a cue sheet leaves out
A cue sheet names tracks and says where each one starts. That is the whole of it. There are no end times and no durations: a track's length is the next start minus its own, and the last has none at all unless the audio is there to measure. Nor is there anything about the sound — no tempo, no key, no waveform, and no way to confirm the audio it names is the one you have.
Anything the recorder or the ripper could not name arrives under a numbered stand-in, so a sheet with no TITLE lines anywhere converts to Track 1, Track 2, Track 3 against perfectly good times. That is the one result that looks broken and is not: the timing survived, and the naming never existed.
The gap that matters most runs the other way. A cue sheet cannot be made from audio. If you have a recording and no sheet, nothing here will listen to it and work out what is playing — that is acoustic fingerprinting, and it is not something this tool does.
Questions
- What does 01:30:37 mean in a .cue file?
- One minute, thirty seconds and thirty-seven CD frames, which comes to 90.49 seconds. Reading that last field as hundredths gives 90.37 instead, which is the usual mistake. To convert any cue time by hand, divide the third number by seventy-five and add it to the seconds: thirty-seven frames is 0.49 of a second, not 0.37.
- Can I open a .cue file in Notepad?
- Yes. It is plain text and usually only a line or two per track. Opening it is the quickest way to see whether the tracks have names at all, because a sheet with no TITLE and PERFORMER lines will never produce a named tracklist however it is converted. If you edit it, save it back in the encoding you found it in, because saving it in another is how accented names get mangled.
- Why does my cue file show a time like 122:15:00?
- The file is not damaged. That is 122 minutes, 15 seconds and no frames — two hours, two minutes and fifteen seconds into the recording. No cue sheet carries hours, so the minutes keep counting upward for as long as the audio runs, and the value is read that way here. Software that shows the same file as 2:15, or refuses it outright, is enforcing a limit the format never had.
- Does this read cue sheets from Exact Audio Copy or Nero?
- Yes. A cue sheet is a cue sheet whatever wrote it, and rippers use the same commands DJ software does. The thing worth checking is whether the sheet names one audio file or one per track. A per-track rip has every entry starting at 00:00:00 inside its own file, and you are told when a sheet references more than one file rather than left to work out why the times look wrong.
- Can I get track lengths out of a cue sheet?
- Only by subtraction, and not for the last one. The sheet records where each track begins and nothing at all about where it ends, so every length except the final one is the next start minus this one. The last track runs to the end of the audio, which the sheet has no knowledge of. If you need that number, it has to come from the audio file itself.
Using something else?
rekordbox
Turn a rekordbox recording into a timestamped tracklist
OpenHow to make one
How to make a tracklist for a DJ mix
OpenYouTube chapters
Make YouTube chapters for a DJ mix
OpenThere is also a full tutorial covering all five programs and what to do when the times look wrong.