Re: [linux-audio-user] cd burning w/out gaps

There is a proper way to do it (the same way the "big boys" do it: prepare a DAO track sheet and burn the CD-A in DAO mode), and a hackish way to do it: burn TAO/SAO and set the successive track gap to 0 (actually I'd wager it's one frame, i.e., 1/75th of a second). You can't do this hack for the first track (whose pre-gap cannot be shortened), but thankfully since there's no "prior track" this doesn't matter much. WARNING: not all burners support very small (or zero) values for this pre-gap. Canonical Orange Book spec says 150 frames [2 seconds] between tracks. You can test it properly though: Generate a 60 seconds long audio file of a 4Khz sine wave, split it into two 30 second pieces accurate to 1/75th of a second frame boundary (if possible use a text entry to specify the cut point), or use a command line tool to generate the source files. Burn both files, each as a track with pregap=0, and then capture the playback (via analogue sampling) from your cd player and look for a glitch near the inter-track point. [It should be audible though.] With normal music, depending on the content, the glitch might be masked. If there's a 1/75th "gap" in playback, you'll get a nicely audible phase error. I used to get away with this on my old Yamaha CDR 100 (long may it occupy my shelf of Honoured Dead as a device of Singular Quality)... NOTE! The way "real" audio CDs pull off this caper is to set the PQ bits [welcome to subcode] accordingly to "unmute" the track. When all else looks dark and gray, look to Quality, =MB= -- A focus on Quality.