Actually, you wouldn't need a cue sheet at all. You'd just need a ripper program that was smart enough to: a) Encode the entire album as one long MP3, then b) Split the big MP3 cleanly at exact frames that are close (within .026 second) of where the CD thinks the track boundaries should fall. Then everything would play back perfectly in player programs that cached the stuff properly.

There is indeed software to do this, it's called musiCutter. The concept is discussed in more depth on the "live-mix" section of the r3mix site. However, this latter site highlights some of the problems with this technique, too. One of the is the obvious: the need for a truly gapless player.

But another reason that it mentioned is ultimately the reason I decided that it was likely best not to split the big MP3 files into little ones. And that is that, according to the r3mix site and other information I had encountered previously, it is not necessarily true that all the information required to reproduce a single frame of sound is contained within the frame itself. In fact, it can spill over into adjoining frames. Perhaps someone with more exact knowledge of the MP3 format and encoding process can help with this (the "byte reservoir?").

But if this is indeed the case, then the gapless player would not be able to achieve truly perfect reproducton without some sort of knowledge that the consecutive MP3 files contain information about each other. Without that information, the reproduction might certainly be acceptable, but not perfect.