.cue files are there to inform your player about where songs/chapters start in a record. It's mostly for situation where you have ripped CDs as singular files and not tracks. It's a frequent occurence in lossless torrents (.flac, .alac, .wav, audiocd territory) and the reasoning behind that may be that it keeps the most exact copy of a CD without any user-side interference, and .cue files are text files laying alongside your cd rip (and probably a log of ripping). Such interference may also be seen as unwanted in some cases, e.g. when the record is mastered that way one track seemlessly flows into another, so any way to cut between them is arguable.

[–] hellmo_luciferrari@lemmy.zip 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I always used CUE splitting software to separate tracks.

[–] altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 16 hours ago

I've done that for export to portable devices and for use in video editing, but other than that I keep them intact to keep seeding the original file without producing duplicates.