I recently noticed EAC is detecting a 'CATALOG' field and writing it out to it's cue sheet, a la:

REM GENRE Rock
REM DATE 2008
REM DISCID 800AC10A
REM COMMENT "ExactAudioCopy v0.99pb4"
CATALOG 5099921688607
PERFORMER "Coldplay"
TITLE "Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends [US, 50999 2 16965 2 7]"

how is 'CATALOG' implemented ? i ask because note the catalog it 'detected' is different than the actual catalog of the disc (which I always manually appenend to the TITLE field). Perhaps EAC detected this from a 'negative cache' (having already ripped the commercial version of that disc, which incidentally when ripped to WV-MD5'd image has the same MD5) ?

thanks in advance.

knock knock

CATALOG is simply read off a CD, there is no detection. What you get in a cuesheet is actually written on a disc. Note, that there may be different editions of a commercial audio cd release (bonus tracks, regional releases etc.) having one catalog number in the inlay sheet.

CD-TEXT found in a CUE sheet is often times not written on a disc. Very few of the CDs in my collection actually contain CD-TEXT, yet I have EAC configured to include this information in a CUE sheet. Where does it get it? From freedb, freedb2 or my keyboard.

CATALOG is not related to CD-TEXT information. To the contrary it is stored in a different segment of one of the subchannels, I guess. Same subchannel but different "segment".

When your writer is capable of writing ISRC or CATALOG (UPC) then these fields of the cue sheets will (hopefully) be written to the CD-R if it is enabled in the drive options.

But in general you should know that the UPC/CATALOG number stored in the subchannel is often wrong or unreadable. It wouldn't surprise me if the EAN based catalog number you can read from the barcode, the inner ring of the CD and the spine of the traycard is different from the one written to the cue sheet. The one on the cover art and the inner ring of the CD is the valid one, the one encoded in the subchannel / written to the cue sheet can be ignored if in doubt.

I was addressing the general statement, but re-reading the post to which I responded I can see I've taken it out of context.

Sorry Egor!