I have an audio CD that exhibits an interesting problem. All symptoms indicate that the TOC of the CD does not point to the start of the music in the tracks but rather a fraction of a second into the track. I tried a number of experiments, the most conclusive was to just load a single ripped track, not the first track, into a player and play it. The music would start abruptly as if a fraction of a second was missing. At the end of the track there would be a short burst of what sounded like the start of the next track. If I rip a track to a wave and look at it I can see about 150 msec of the next track at the end of the track I am looking at.
When listening to the album on a standalone player or a PC player with gapless output, there is no problem as long as I play the tracks in track order. Unfortunately my car MP3 player does not have gappless output so there is an interruption at the start of all but the first track.
Recently I saw another post where someone had a similar problem. Someone suggested using EAC to rip to a image file + cue sheet, edit the cue sheet to adjust the track start times. I also had obtained a Plexwriter Premium and Plextools since I last ripped this CD. So time for some experimenting.
I first tried ripping the CD with Plextools. It ripped with no errors but the problem was still there.
I then tried making an image file with EAC. About 60% thru the rip EAC slowed almost to a halt. It took a minute or two for each 0.1% ripped. I decided it would be quicker to make a copy with Plextools and try to use the copy with EAC. The copy took a little longer than normal but completed without error.
Somewhere in this process I noticed a moderately bad scratch on the CD which was probably what caused EAC to be so slow.
Now comes the interesting part.
EAC was able to extract an image and cue file from the copy with no problem. When I got the EAC editor up and looked at the track marks they all looked OK. The track start markers were all in advance of the start of the music for the track. Could EAC have a different interpretation of the TOC of the CD I wondered.
I then tried ripping the CD to MP3s with EAC. No problems ripping from the copy. When I listened to some of the tracks they were all OK, the problem was gone.
I then tried ripping the copy with Plextools. The problem was gone there also.
It would appear that when Plextools copied the CD, it fixed whatever problem was causing the track start positions to be wrong. It nice that it fixed it but its disconcerting that the copy is not the same as the original.
Does anyone have any ideas on what is going on here?
After I finished this experiment I managed to sand and polish out the scratch that was causing EAC so much grief. I can now read the original with EAC. Is there any information I can extract from the original and the copy that might explain what is happening?
Thanks for any input