OK, I think I have the whole thing tied up now. I found a useful site which offered some advice on the
EAC/flac/cue relationship. I set up my EAC to the same spec as his, with support for tag and block cue sheet embedding and it now seems to work. I have correctly listed albums which select and play as they should.
I have also ruled out the need for a cue file stored in XBMC. With ripping according to this new setup I need to copy the cue file to the same folder as the flac file on my NAS drive and it plays. If I have a copy of the cue file saved on the XBMC machine, I still get that single file entry for the whole album with a time of the total for all tracks reported. This is also present within the track list if the cue file is in both the NAS folder and the XBMC folder.
So there seem to be a few things I have learned and as this seems to be a quietly popular gripe here is the solution to my own problems in "FLAC for Dummies" format
:
1) The problem seems to be caused by EAC not XBMC! Check that EAC is NOT set to support ID3 tags in any way in its Compression Options (F11). Use
THIS LINK if you want to know more or be sure.
2) Follow the advice of the site in the link at the top of this post to set up cue sheet embedding as he advises. It is not immediately obvious to non-technical types but you may need to add
--tag-from-file=CUESHEET="%YOUR-TITLE-TAG%.cue" --cuesheet="%YOUR-TITLE-TAG%.cue" to your Additional Command Line Options in the Compression Options dialog. The "YOUR-TITLE-TAG" macro, (just a text substitution trick), is set up at the beginning of the Additional Command Line Options field.
3) Use Foobar2000 to massage the tag situation. Open the flac file in Foobar, highlight either the single album file or all of the tracks if they are listed, right click and select Properties. Remove any superfluous tags such as the Track Title and Number if they show just any other single value. (I also removed the Disc Number for single disc albums as I prefer not to have it list tracks as "1.02" but it is useful for multidisc albums.) Once correct they should display nothing for a single track listing or <<multiple values>> for a list of tracks. (You can of course use a different tag editor but I can't advise on where that would go.)
4) Use Foobar2000 in the same way but this time select 'Utilities -> Edit Cuesheet' from the right click menu. Tick the "Enable embedded cue sheet on this file" box. Press [Load] and navigate to the cue sheet. Open it and, hey presto, the cue sheet appears in the dialog box. [OK] this. Nothing will appear to change! If you access Edit Cuesheet again to check you may be told that the cuesheet has still not been embedded! Do not panic, set it up correctly then select another file in Foobar, then go back to the one you have just edited. These options only seem to be saved when Foobar drops the file. Once you access it again you should find it displays all of the individual tracks as it should.
5) Save the flac file and cue sheet together to the usual place you store your albums. XBMC should now display that album with a track by track listing.
I hope this helps other who are not XBMC gurus. It took a while but I think I know a bit more about what is required to get flac file support up and running reliably again. If there is anything anyone can usefully add please do so, I may learn even more and be quite well informed at last!