At edwin's request, I've moved this to its own thread...

Here's another phenomenon I've encountered on one of my CDs that I'm trying to understand how best to duplicate on an EMPEG.

If you've created CUE sheets with Exact Audio Copy (for example), then you've seen that most CD tracks have an "Index 0" timestamp and an "Index 1" timestamp. Usually, the time period between Index 0 and Index 1 contains the inter-track silence, and the music proper begins at Index 1. If you use the "skip forward" or "skip backward" buttons on a CD player, it will always seek out the Index 1 timestamp.

However, there is nothing that prevents the CD from having sound between Index 0 and Index 1. Indeed, one of my CDs does just that. In this case, what happens is that the band starts playing, and then decides to stop playing and start over again. The "false" start lies between Index 0 and Index 1, and the second "true" start actual track begins at Index 1. There's no gap in between. If you try to hit your CD player's "skip backward" button to go back to the beginning of the track, you won't hear the false start; it will just move back to Index 1 and continue from there.

Now when I'm encoding this track, I have two choices:

1) Keep this false start as part of the MP3 file.
2) Split the track into two pieces between the false start and the true start, and encode the two pieces in some sort of gapless fashion.

The first method is the easiest. The second has the potential to better emulate the behavior of the CD when I'm playing it back. However, the one quirk of the second method is that I wouldn't want the "false start" to play if I was in "shuffle play" mode. So, I would need to find a way to ignore that track if I'm shuffling, but I'd want it to play if I'm going sequentally through the album.

What do you think, folks?

Michael Grant
12GB Green
080000266