cue-normalize

Minimal Bash CLI for normalizing and repairing problematic .cue files in large music archives.

Features

• Recursively scans .cue files from a selected archive root
• Converts legacy encodings to UTF-8
• Removes UTF-8 BOM and CRLF line endings
• Repairs common broken TITLE, PERFORMER, SONGWRITER, FILE, and TRACK lines
• Tries to resolve broken FILE references from adjacent audio files
• Creates centralized backups in Original_CUE/
• Does not create backup directories in --dry-run mode
• Uses temporary files and only replaces originals after validation
• Supports --dry-run and --verbose

Usage

Run from the root of a music archive:

cue-normalize --dry-run --verbose
cue-normalize

Or pass an archive root explicitly:

cue-normalize --dry-run --verbose /path/to/music/archive
cue-normalize /path/to/music/archive

Show help:

cue-normalize --help

Show version:

cue-normalize --version

Dependencies

Required at runtime:

• bash
• coreutils
• findutils
• grep
• sed
• gawk
• perl
• file

Optional:

• uchardet for better encoding detection

iconv is used for charset conversion and is typically provided by glibc on Arch Linux.

Design Philosophy

• Keep it a single Bash script
• Prefer conservative fixes over speculative rewriting
• Use simple Unix tools
• Back up first, then modify
• Skip unsafe cases instead of forcing changes

Limitations

• Does not fully implement the CUE specification
• Focuses on real-world corruption cases seen in music archives
• Not a full validator
• Cannot make ambiguous FILE references safe if multiple audio files match
• Some libcue limitations, such as very large track counts, are outside the scope of this tool

AUR Packaging Notes

The included PKGBUILD installs:

• the cue-normalize executable to /usr/bin
• the MIT license to /usr/share/licenses/cue-normalize/

License

MIT