i've got a few cds which don't have the usual 2 sec gap between songs, you know, like the songs were meant to 'run' into each other

when i use EAC to make a FLAC backup of each track, is there some extra feature/file i can use to preserve this property of the cd without me having to remember to burn the cd without gaps when my original becomes unplayable, one day...?

If you're trying to backup a CD without adding extra silence, your software must be configured to burn without gaps, without exception.

Save a cue sheet of each disc. EAC has the command under Action/Create cue sheet>Current gap settings. You may have to manually edit the filenames in the cue sheets to change the extension from .wav to .flac unless you decode your tracks before burning. Any text editor will work.
The great free program Burrrn will burn gaplessly without a cue sheet, if the tracks are ripped with EAC, and EAC is configured correctly.

great, i'll do the cue thing from now on, is there anything special about burrrn? or can i just use the gapless setting in nero instead?
which program would i use to burn a cd using the cue sheet? EAC?

That's the thing, generally speaking you aren't going to be able to use a noncompliant CUE sheet with Nero; you'll have to use either Burrrn or EAC. With Burrrn you can create a CD from the flac files. With EAC you'll have to decompress them to waves first.

CUE sheets aren't necessary for gapless audio but when they're used with Nero (or edited so they can be used with Nero), they'll prevent it from adding extra silence between tracks without having to jump through hoops.

(Though editing a CUE sheet or creating one from scratch could be considered jumping through hoops )

ok so i just realised that i don't know much bout how cd tracks and their gaps work...
i did some 'detect gaps' moves in EAC and noticed that some albums, like meat loaf's bat out of hell 2, have various different size gaps for each track, from 0 to 2 secs, but this albums pretty much sounds gapless

so how does it work? when you rip tracks from a cd to wav (before turning em in mp3 of flac or whatever) if there is a gap after a track does that get added to the wav? or are there different types of gaps?

if i were to rip the tracks off this meat loaf album (which sounds gapless) and then reburn them using nero with the no gaps setting on would the end result be identical to the original?
and if i have an album with clear 2 sec gaps on each track, and i ripped them to wav and then burned those back to cd with nero with the no gaps setting on, would the songs retain their original gaps?
i'm confused again!

First of all I recommend you read and understand these articles. They tell you how to configure EAC the right way:

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...e_Configuration
http://users.pandora.be/satcp/eac02p.htm

For setting up the read offset of your drive this database might be of interest to you:

http://www.daefeatures.co.uk/search.php


Here you can learn more about Audio CD gaps:

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Gap_settings


Then I strongly recommend that you rip to a single FLAC image (2 files), and not to several tracks + a non-compliant cue sheet (number of tracks + 1 files), because this is... well non-compliant. Don't expect those cue sheet to work with every burning app. The only applications that can burn a CD from these non-compliant rips are Burrrn and EAC itself.

I usually rip to single image and a cue sheet, and use that for listening to the album, foobar2000 for example support single image + cue sheet playback perfectly and converting the tracks to several lossy files (MP3, Ogg Vorbis, etc) is also a piece of cake with foobar2000.

If you insist on using lossless single tracks and a non-compliant cue sheet then you can always convert it to a single image file with Moitah's CUETools (.NET 2.0 needed) in case you might need. Those converted rips are 100% identical to rips that would have been done with EAC.

So yeah, Nero can't use cuesheets. Yet. It ain't perfect, but you can certainly burn gapless discs from FLAC source files... Here's how I do it:

With the Nero FLAC decoder plugin installed (freely available on the web, just Google for it), drag tracks into new CD compilation and wait for Nero to parse them (if you tag the FLAC files it'll use the titles for CD-TEXT too), then just select all of the files except the first one, Alt+Enter (or right-click and Properties) to open Properties panel and just change the Pause duration from 2 seconds to 0.

Works great for me every time.

...and my point is having to do this for every CD you want to burn is jumping through hoops.

Use Burrrn and you don't have to worry about having to remember to do this every single time.

Personally, these days I prefer separate tracks with noncompliant CUE sheets and use EAC with a configured write samples offset. This way, future rips from this backup can be recognized by AccurateRip. You won't be able to do with Burrrn or Nero. Now I have nothing against single image files with CUE sheets (I used to do them this way), just that I now prefer separate tracks. I get gapless playback either way on my PC.

One thing nice about separate tracks is that EAC allows for Test & Copy with direct CRC comparison. This is also the only way to get AccurateRip results. If you get an error along the way which may require some cleaning/polishing to recover, you only have to rip the track again, rather than the entire image. If you have a caching drive without reliable C2 performance this can save a lot of time.

so i suppose using one image flac file or seperate files is pretty much up to personal preference?
personally i think i'm sticking to the seperate flac files and the cue sheet, i don't select the noncompliant cue sheet in EAC tho... i pick 'current gap settings', would that be 'noncompliant too?', thing is tho, even if it is, you can always just use EAC to burn cds, and if the program i use in the future doesn't support my cue files the gaps will still be attached to the individual song files (i read the wiki!) and all i'll be missing is that little move that standalone cd players do with the -x seconds before some songs!

Yes, I would say so. If you rip to seperate tracks the right way, then you still have a perfect copy. And both methods have certain advantages and disadvantes. To remind you, in case you come across some difficulties with your current rips, you can always convert between those different rips easily with Moitah's CUETools.


Well, at least it is here. To be more precise if you have set "Append Gaps To Previous Track (default)" then "Current Gap Settings..." is the same as "Multiple WAV Files With Gaps... (Noncompliant)". And if you have set "Append Gaps To Next Track" then "Current Gap Settings..." will produce the same cue sheet as with "Multiple WAV Files With Corrected Gaps...".


Exactly, and for completeness sake the only two ways to preserve that pregap that gives you the negative countdown on CD players (which means 1:1 copy of the CD's layout), are either "Append Gaps To Previous Track (default)"+"Multiple WAV Files With Gaps... (Noncompliant)" or "Copy Image & Create CUE Sheet".

If you want the tracks ("Append Gaps To Previous Track (default)"!) to start at the same points as the originals but omit the pregaps then all you need to do is burn them with a 0 second gap, which won't be an exact copy, but when skipping through the tracks won't sound any different because the tracks start at the exact same time.

Actually, using a corrected gaps cue sheet + separate tracks with gaps appended (prepended) to the next track will give you a 1:1 copy.

Appending gaps to the previous track + a noncompliant cue sheet will not give you a 1:1 copy if there is non-silent data in the extended pregap (00 index before the 01 index of the first track, also called HTOA; Hidden Track One Audio).

Yeah, well it's true. But many drives can't read there anyway. Besides for some CDs prepended gap tracks aren't really an enjoyable listen. Therefore not very practicable imho.

I agree with you 100%.

You might want to listen to the pregaps (or use the "detect silence..." feature) before deciding where to append them. A small percentage of pregaps are not just silent pauses. Sometimes they contain audio, and you might want to choose where to append them according to the circumstance. In my experience, non-silent pregaps are far more likely to be found on live performances. For example, a common occurence is song intros. Do you want the intro for a song appended to the end of the previous song?

YES - rip to lossless image with cue sheet then learn to use Burrrn and the foobar convert utility. Every option is thus left open.