Does having 'hidden' audio in the pre-gap to track 1 break the red book standard?
eg. cue sheet looks something like this...

TRACK 01 AUDIO
TITLE "XXX"
PERFORMER "XXX"
INDEX 00 00:00:00
INDEX 01 06:05:70
TRACK 02 AUDIO
TITLE "XXX
PERFORMER "XXX"
INDEX 00 07:21:35
INDEX 01 07:25:33
TRACK 03 AUDIO
TITLE "XXX"
PERFORMER "XXX
INDEX 00 16:36:32
INDEX 01 16:40:29

I've got a several CDs with less than a second of silence in there, and one CD with a hidden track buried there (They Might Be Giants - Factory Showroom). I've never had the ones with the tiny amount of silence be a problem, but Factory Showroom causes some CD-ROM drives to go haywire (they eventually reject the disk as unreadable, usually spitting it out) and some ripping programs won't rip the hidden track. I know cdparanoia handles it fine in my Plextors, and I assume EAC (being really cool) handles it OK as well. I don't recall off hand which drives had a problem with it.

Oh, and I don't know if it breaks the standard. CDs that have silence there are pretty common, so I assume it's kosher (if weird).

Hmm, I just clicked in here to see what a thread with no thread starter might look like

No problems with EAC or ripping, it's just one of my cd players can search back to the hidden audio whereas the other can't.
I am just wondering whether the cd itself is non-standard therefore the cd player has no 'obligation' as to whether it can read the hidden audio or not.

You seem to have answered your own question
Audio data stored in INDEX 00 of first track is likely not fully compliant with Red Book. If it was, no player would have any trouble whatsoever. But it is no biggie for almost all of them.
CD-ROM drives could choke, though, and refuse to rip. I remember, long time ago (three or four years is a LONG time in the computer world), such TOC alterations where used as primitive forms of copy protection.

A minority of regular CD players can play the hidden track of Factory Showroom - I suppose your CD is something similar. Actually, in my experience, older players do the best on it (you can't skip back a track, but rewinding one minute from the beginning of the first track does it). OTOH, just because CD players have trouble with it, does not mean that it's doesn't conform to a standard. I've seen a CD player that will have trouble with any CD with more than 32 tracks and another that had trouble with more than 60 (I think there was a "The Offspring" CD with a hidden track at 69 that would give it trouble). Redbook allows up to 99 tracks IIRC.

True,
Think about MP3 portable players. Some of them are not compatible with 320 kbps MP3s or VBR MP3s, but these files are nonetheless standard.
Or DVD Players : A TV serie was issued in a rare anamorphic PAL resolution in France (something like 320x576), many players, inculding some Toshiba, couldn't play them properly (deformed image, cropped image...). The DVD was blamed and reissued in the usual 720x576, while it was the players that were bugged.

I wish you hadn't reminded me about the hidden track on 'Factory Showroom'. My 10 year old Meridian CD player is the only one that I've tried that will sometimes play it.



Well I just tried ripping with EAC & my Yamaha CRW3200E - i get this:

CATALOG 0075596186223
PERFORMER "They Might Be Giants"
TITLE "Factory Showroom"
FILE "CDImage.wav" WAVE
TRACK 01 AUDIO
TITLE "S-E-X-X-Y"
PERFORMER "They Might Be Giants"
INDEX 00 00:00:00
INDEX 01 01:01:00
TRACK 02 AUDIO
TITLE "Till My Head Falls Off"
PERFORMER "They Might Be Giants"
INDEX 00 04:52:09
INDEX 01 04:52:11
etc....

No hidden track - now I really want to hear it again :'(

The way I have (mis)understood this, is that after having "seeked" (me bad dumb foreigner) to a track, a cdplayer will start playing from index01.
Press rewind and you'll be in the gap beween index00 and index01.

On playing a cd from beginning to end with no skips, you will of course play all these gaps as a cd plays "consecutively" (me bad again).

Track01Index00-Track01Index01 is an area you will have to rewind to get tho'.

Yes, we can see it in your cuesheet :

INDEX 00 00:00:00
INDEX 01 01:01:00

Rip index 0 and you're done (copy selected tracks index based).

IIRC, there's also a hidden "pre-track" in front of 311's "Transistor". I don't seem to remember having any problems playing it (play track 1, rewind).

I haven't tried to rip it yet (I'm only up to "P" in my quest to rip my entire collection, and 311 is filed under "T").