Kyle Wrote:
> Funny you should mention -Abbey Road-, as this is one of the albums that
> I have converted to flac via EAC. I must have done something right
> because it plays back correctly via SB3. Proper gapping is important
> to me, particularly in live albums where I can't stand a slight gap --
> and the resulting silence of crowd noise -- between tracks. If I am
> ripping and compressing correctly, as I seem to be, are you saying I
> want to write with no gaps to retain the proper gapping? Also, I want
> to keep the original file, can I specify the wav file to go to a
> different folder?
Mmm, _Abbey Road_... I just can't get enough. :) I'm listening to
_Give Up_ by The Postal Service ATM, but I've queued up _Abbey Road_
next. I'll probably listen to both in entirety before I finish with
this diatribe.
It's good that it plays correctly for you. As I said, assuming that
you're using the default settings of EAC, it is appending any pre-track
gaps to the end of the previous track. This means that when listening
to the full album you're getting the content of those gaps, but at the
end of the previous track. Using _Abbey Road_ as an example, there are
gaps of varying lengths for tracks 1-8. Then, starting with _You Never
Give Me Your Money_, there are no gaps until _Her Majesty_, which has a
whopping 14s45f[rame] gap (all silence). (75 frames to a second.) This
particular silent gap in your FLAC copies should actually be at the end
of, umm, _The End_. :) If you open that file (or more likely a
decompression of it) in a sound file editor (Goldwave for basic stuff,
Cubase if you're insane), you'll see the waveform go flat at the end
for a little over 14 seconds.
If you were to burn this disc using the files you have now, you would
absolutely want to set the CD writing program to have zero second gaps.
[That's the short answer. You can stop now if you want. If you really
really want to have an exact copy of your discs from digital copies,
read on.]
[Unrelated to your main questions, but although I've never used the
feature it appears that you can specify an output directory in FLAC
Frontend so that your WAVs end up in a different directory than your
FLACs.]
Burning this way will retain the zero-gap nature of tracks 8-16.
However, on your burned disc you will lose the fact that there are
explicit short gaps between tracks 1-8 and a large gap before track 17.
These gaps will still be present in that they are appended to the end
of each previous track. If you listen to the album straight through,
it will sound the same.
However, oddities will surface if you listen to any of the songs within
a program/playlist or on shuffle. Let's use _The End_ as an example
because it has such a large gap as to be noticeable. In your newly
burned disc, _The End_ will have 14s45f of silence at the end which was
previously the pre-track gap for _Her Majesty_.
If you were to listen to your original _Abbey Road_ on shuffle and come
to this song (_The End_), the player will skip to the next song at the
end of the track, which is at 2m05s17f. When the program/shuffle
eventually goes directly to _Her Majesty_, you will not actually hear
the 14s45f gap because when skipping directly to a track CD players
skip the gap.
When you listen to your burned copy of _Abbey Road_ on shuffle and come
to _Her Majesty_, it will start in the same place and you will not hear
any gap. This is because it was appended to the end of _The End_,
giving that track a length of 2m19s62f, and effectively forcing you to
listen to it at the end of that track. That is, when you come to the
end of _The End_ on your burned copy, you'll be treated to a little
over fourteen and a half seconds of silence. This is not a problem
when listening to the album as a whole when you want to hear it as the
artist(s) intended, but perhaps a little out of place on a shuffle or
custom playlist.
Of course, all of this is usually academic when the gaps contain
(usually minor) bits of silence. It becomes a nuiscance (even on the
SqueezeBox or other digital players) when the gaps contain actual
content. This is admittedly rare, but it does happen. On many of The
Future Sound Of London's CDs, the pre-track gaps contain a few frames
of song content. These end up appended to the end of the previous
track, which sounds odd on a shuffle mix or custom playlist. A larger
example is to be found in The Crystal Method's _Vegas_. Track 5 has a
1m25s50f gap of actual music (I know, arguably so) that ends up
appended to the end of track 4 in a digital copy. I have a few
instrumental live performance CDs where the pre-track gaps contain 1-2
minute spoken word introductions by the MC. Certainly nothing one
wants to hear when listening to the CD on (or within) a shuffle mix.
Furthermore, each track in a CD can actually have up to 99 indices
defined within it that I think were orginally meant to allow listeners
to skip around between distinct parts of a song by way of "index skip"
buttons, although CD player manufacturers quickly dropped support the
feature. For example, tracks with more than one base index (>= 1) can
be found on Engima's _MCMXC a.D._ (tracks 1 and 7) and R.E.M.'s _New
Adventures In Hi-Fi_ (track 6). The FLAC format appears to support
these indices (0-99) through embedded CUE sheets, but I don't think
that most, if any, software supports them. Please correct me if I'm
wrong and I'll look more strongly into using embedded CUE sheets. In
any case, there is nothing that currently allows you do do anything
with these "in-track indices", as with most current CD players.
Retaining all this pre-track gap and index information when ripping is
the prevue of CUE sheets. As I personally want the convenience of
individual files for each track when using the Squeezebox and other
digital music players, I continue of rip with EAC set to append
pre-track gaps to the end of the previous track, as you have done by
default. In addition, before ripping, I detect gaps ("Action | Detect
Gaps" or F4) and then create a CUE sheet ("Action | Create CUE Sheet |
Current Gap Settings...") and save that CUE sheet in the directory in
which I will save the final WAV/FLAC files. You can read about the
various CUE sheet formats at
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=EAC_CUE_Sheets.
Saving the CUE sheet this way creates a technically noncompliant CUE
sheet, but EAC is able to deal with them to write a perfect copy of a
CD on CD-R. Go to "Tools | Write CD-R..." and then use "File | Load
CUE Sheet..." to load the CUE sheet that you previously saved. Before
doing this, of course, you have to decompress the FLAC files to WAV so
that EAC knows what to do with them.
As you seem to have already ripped many of your CDs, know that all is
not lost. I did this myself before knowing more about CUE sheets, but
found that I could "detect gaps" and "create the CUE sheet" later with
the same effect because the information stored in the individual WAVs
with the default EAC settings was the same as if I had performed the
correct process from the start. That is, having ripped _Abbey Road_
with the default EAC settings, you can now put that disc back in your
machine, "detect gaps", and then "create the CUE sheet" and get a CUE
sheet that will work with those previously ripped tracks.
Whew. That's quite a lot, I know. If you need more information, or
more step-by-step directions, feel free to contact me at eq72521 at
gmail dot com.
To anyone else experienced that's managed to read this far, this is
something that I think could use more explanation in the wiki. Would
something like that be appreciated, or am I just plain too long-winded
to make good user documentation?
--
eq72521
------------------------------------------------------------------------
eq72521's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1512
View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=19133
_______________________________________________
ripping mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
