> There was a discussion some time ago about > burning a CD without the automatic 2 sec gap > between the tracks. I didn't really follow it until I needed > to do the same thing. Sorry if I'm repeating an old posting > but I found that cdrecord has an option, > defpregap, that can be used in this case. Just give > > $cdrecord defpregap=0 -other-options *.wav > > and it works. The tracks are searchable,and still the mix > goes uninteruppted. Unfortunately, the man page says > "This option may go away in the future":( 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.
