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It is gap-related, as you suggest. Without a cuesheet you only have INDEX 01 info, not INDEX 00 or INDEX 02+.

I've never seen an index greater than 01, but there are some about. I have seen many tracks with INDEX 00 entries though.

Whether being able to indicate these INDEX 00 entries is important to you is another question.

I rip to images so I don't have to concern myself with such things.

Multiple indexes per track tend to be found with classical CDs as a way to have gapless playback, but still be able to skip around to the various movements easily.

It is a convenience for me. I prefer having an immediate file to work with that defines a media file's characteristics. That way I can just look at the CUE sheet of something instead of downloading the whole sets of files, or one large file [as mostly everything on my computer becomes maximum compressed RAR archives].

And I am with Synthetic Soul: "I rip to images so I don't have to concern myself with such things."

I rip to individual tracks, because I find CUE sheets highly annoying, and I don't care in the slightest about the gaps. Plus, who actually burns CDs nowadays?

Even with classical music multiple index are rare.
The first CD-players were not all gapless and that's probably why some older CD have some funny structure (David Bryant said once he owned a release of Gould's Goldberg-Variationen with one track and 32 index!). Old CDs are nevertheless not alone in this situation. I sometime encounter modern recordings with multiple index which introduce a virtual splitting of long tracks. The problem is that many and probably most CD players can't seek index but only tracks. And correct me if I'm wrong, there's currently no software player supporting cuesheet that allow the user to jump at the beginning of index >1. I think you have to manually edit the cuesheet and replace index as tracks if you want to benefit from the additional information provided by the multiple index. A bit boring but there's maybe a more comfortable way I currently ignore. Cheers

Gaps are not necessarily silent. The gap will be included in the audio track/file, while the cuesheet will contain the timing information necessary to define it as a gap. They will no longer be marked as gaps if you burn a copy of the CD without that information, and will not show up in supporting CD players as such.


No, because the audio files contain the "gap" (i.e. its audio data) while the cuesheet indicates its span. As I said above, the gaps do not have to contain silence. Think about songs with intros on the end of the previous track, or live albums with crowd partipation or the bands talking between songs - two (perhaps bad) examples of reasons for gaps being defined and stored on the previous track.

Sure, you may not care about marking gaps as such, or even including them, but to answer what I believe to be one of your original questions: yes, keeping gap information is one of the most common reasons for using cuesheets. Others, which I myself value, include UPC/ISRC/FLAG retrieval and CD-Text (although I usually have to enter it myself, thus having the .cue double up as a playlist).

I hope that this helps!

dv1989, oh ok. that is the answer I was looking for. So the audio-gaps are specified as gaps then in the cuesheet. Ok I got the idea.

So, in practice, audibly, a CD that is burned with the gaps merged in the tracks (as silence), would have the same effect of the original CD, that is... no need for the cuesheet then...