I recently noticed the Offset Correction feature for compression in Exact Audio Copy, and after playing around with it for a while I am not sure whether I should use it or not as a means to achive gapless playback. It seems to calculate an offset specific to the default Windows decompressor, but I listen to my MP3's primarily on my car stereo, so I'm not sure if this is useful for me.

I need to know what difference there is between this method and LAME's two built-in means for achieving gapless playback (the --nogap feature and LAME's track length tag), and which is a better solution for achieving gapless playback in capable hardware players.

I think I just found exactly what I need with Nyaochi's EAC cuesheet-support modifications.

I'm still curious at what exactly the compression offset function does and how useful it is outside of Windows.

Hi,

I would suggest you leave this option unused. It's best to use this only if you specifically have an album or recording where there is a problem detected when using LAME at its default of 576 padded samples.

It could be useful for helping to get past the inherent problems with formats such as MP3 which are not gapless by attempting to compensate for the offset of the encoder as well as decoder to attain effectively 0 offset, IIRC.
Using LAME to decode the (LAME encoded) files will compensate for this. A large issue created by this is that if you use the enc/dec compression offset which the option is configured for then the same decoder must always be used or it will only make decoding back to 0 offset correctly that much more difficult. It is feasible that this could be done for LAME encoder offset + the mpg123 decoder offset if you didn't trust the plugin on its own but then you would quite likely effect the offset decoder for your car player and any other decoder which doesn't use the same as mp3123.

Here's a little info from SatCP's site and you can find quite a bit of related info by searching both the EAC mailing list, the EAC forum & HA.org using a few variations of the words.

My mind isn't working the best today so I may have missed something, I hope this is of some help though.

Have a nice day, tec

Edit: Doh! I told you I wasn't thinking well.. I forgot to say thanks for the link, I was aware of the LAME modified version John33 produced, I hadn't come across more info on the patch though.