Easy-CD Pro audio limitations

Here's why. When you write a CD out, the individual tracks have a space between on them referred to as pre- gap. The length of this gap depends on what format each of the tracks is written to. For example, a CD- ROM data track followed by a CD-ROM XA tracks needs to have a 3 second gap between them. How big the gap needs between tracks needs to be depends not only on the track format but on how the disc is written; some of the gaps can be written smaller if the disc is written in disc-at-once mode, where the entire CD is written in one pass without pausing. If you have an audio track followed by another audio track, as you typically would on a regular audio CD, there is no gap between tracks when using disc-at-once mode. But if you write using track-at-once mode instead, there is a 2 second long gap between every audio track that you have no control over. In order to properly create audio CDs that have transition between tracks without a pause, you configure the software to use disk-at-once mode (and, I'll mention again, have a drive that supports that mode of writing).

All right, fair enough. What's the problem? First, the current version of ECDP doesn't support the use of disc-at-once as part of the disc copy utility when copying audio discs (this information is buried under the What Kinds of CDs Can I Copy? heading of the help file in the How do I make Backup Copies of CDs section). The button is grayed out so you can't check it, and sure enough disc-at-once is not used when making audio copies. The next thing to try, then, is using the regular audio CD utility to try and copy tracks over. Yes, you can create audio CDs without gaps using that part of the program. Two problems with that, though. First, the audio CD interface, like everything else, requires that you drag-and-drop something into it in order to add to the disc. How do you drag an audio CD track? Under Windows 95, you can do that; go looking at Your Computer, choose the drive the audio CD is in, and there are all the tracks. Under Windows NT, you're out of luck; until the '95 interface shows up in NT 4.0, you can't drag audio CD tracks. This is a minor issue, though; the real problem is that the "drag tracks from another audio CD" approach limits you to tracks from one CD at once. Well, maybe more if you had a whole bank of CD-ROM players to copy from or a supported CD- ROM changer (don't have one of those myself to see if that can be made to work), but for most of us one CD worth of audio material is the only source we could use. That's hardly acceptable; one of the attractions of being able to make your own audio CDs is the ability to pull from multiple sources. What to do?

Some sweat yields some answers

It made me a little better to find out that nobody else knew how to get rid of the gap, either. A call to Incat informed me that they were aware of the unsightly 2 second gap, and to their knowledge it was impossible to work around with their software. Not a big surprise that they didn't know; after all, writing data is what has their software flying off the shelves, the audio support is obviously not as well thought through. There's nothing better to inspire my curiosity about how to do something then to tell me it's impossible, so I dug deeper into the program.

Thankfully, a bit of experimentation yielded a workaround. Another acceptable source for audio that you can drop into the track window are wave (.WAV) files sampled at CD standard configuration (stereo, 16 bits, 44.1Khz). If you have some of those, you can write them to a CD off of your hard drive by dragging the WAV file into ECDP's window. The program feature that dovetails nicely with is sitting in the Disc Info and Tools section. When displaying all the tracks on the disc in that window, there's a button labeled Read Track sitting at the bottom. If you select some number of tracks, then hit Read Track, you can pick a file name and supported read speed. The software will then whirl away, copying all the audio data in that track into a CD format WAV file on your hard drive somewhere.

Audio CD creation in a bunch of easy steps

The proper procedure that yields a nearly perfect copy of an audio CD is start by putting the original in the CD-R drive (read track only works from a CD-R drive that supports reading digital audio, which happily the Yamaha CDR-100 is). Select Disc Info and Tools, then the run of tracks you want to copy. You can highlight more then one track in the DI&T track display window either by dragging the mouse over them or by moving to the first track, holding down the shift key, then using the arrow keys to move to the last one. Click the Track Read button to get that dialog box. Choose the maximum speed of your CD-R drive (the default automatic setting always reads at single speed on my system, and who has time to wait for that). Choose where you want to save the file at, either by typing the name or using the browse feature. Note that if you selected more then one track, the name you type in is used as a prefix, with the track number on the disc appended to it (so be careful to use a different prefix if you're reading the same track number off of different discs into the same directory). Click on Read, and off the computer goes creating big old WAV files on your drive somewhere. The disk usage for the WAV files is over 10MB/minute, since a 74 minute CD takes up 747MB of space plus a touch of WAV file overhead as well (that only translates into 650MB of data because of other recording overhead). There is one caveat with reading tracks this way; sometimes, I've gotten tracks that had the ends cut off of them when copying them into WAV files. I don't know exactly what caused it, but it only seems to have happened to me when I was trying to do something else on the computer while reading the tracks in. As long I let Incat have the whole system, everything seems fine, but I highly suggest using a utility like the Windows Media Player to check each of your WAV files endings to make sure they survived the reading process before you go burning away. This is a very annoying problem, as it only shows up during final, complete listening to the finished product; potentially very embarrassing, too, if you don't do proper QA on discs before you release them to others (just checking to make sure every track plays doesn't spot it).

Once you get all the tracks you want to record on a CD onto your hard drive as a series of wave file, start a new project. Choose to make a new CD-DA audio CD. Drop all your WAV files from File Manager (or whatever drag and drop server you want to use) into the track window. Move over into the General tab and type a comment if you feel like it (I have no idea how to read any of these comments off a CD, but I put 'em in anyway). Select a recording speed and turn off testing mode. I've had bizzarre problems creating audio CDs if I test them first; weird clicking overlaid on the first audio track and such other oddness. I recommend that you bite the bullet, cut a few CDs with successively increasing write speeds, and see if your hardware craps out on you instead of using the test mode (which is really designed more for testing complicated data CDs instead of reading simple WAV files). Click on disc- at-once and watch the close box dissapear. That's it! Start the recording by hitting the record button or choose Write! off the menu, and watch it whirl away. It's a little odd watching the timing go the first time, because it seems like it works for a bit, stops, then starts again (presumably this behavior is due to the CD-R buffer), but after that I just let it rip and stay away from the computer until it finishes. You can try and multitask your computer and work on something else in the background while it writes, but I don't suggest introducing the chance that you'll tie up some component in your system long enough that the CD-R flushes its buffer and eats its blank CD.

That's how you can make a perfect copy of most CDs, or make your own complications (err, compilations), or mix CD tracks with ones you made on your computer, or any number of things. I've made a small stack of audio CDs with this approach, and they all play fine on every CD player I own, and no between track gaps to be found. I said that you could make a perfect copy of nearly every audio CD this way. Two exceptions I've found so far. First off, although the sacred Red Book puts CDs at a maximum length of 74 minutes, which is all any CD- R I know of will write, I have quite a few CDs in my collection with lengths that exceed this by quite a bit. Some CD players hiccup once you get over this magic mark (I've noticed that the Kenwood changer in my car goes nuts whenever I get into the last track on Meatloaf's Bat out of Hell II). Big compilations, 2-on-1 releases, and box sets seem the biggest source of these out of spec discs, although I've also a classical work that topped the 80 minute mark. They're out of spec, and you can't copy everything from them onto a blank; in fact, with the Yamaha drive and Incat's software, I can't even read tracks from above the 74 minute mark into a WAV file. This is a bummer; I've got things like the Elton John To Be Continued box set, an excellent collection but out of print and accordingly handled very carefully. I wanted to make backup copies of them I could freely abuse, but no luck; the CD copy utility chokes on it at the beginning, and I can't read the last track of the discs with the read track function, so there doesn't appear to be any way to copy this with my current CD-R setup.

There is one other thing that you may run into; certain CDs you copy with this method will sound fine, but the track display will be different. Obviously, all the index information is gone right off the bat. Another odd feature you'll find on some CDs won't get replicated properly. It's possible to put sound at the beginning of a track, labeled so that it appears before the point labeled time 0, that is skipped if you go directly to that track, but is heard if you listen to the previous track first. Some players display this as happening in negative time; for example, a 30 second interlude recorded this way starts at time -30 and counts up until it hits time 0. Doing this sort of thing has become increasingly popular lately, with bands attempting to show how techno-hip they are by making some blank tracks and then hiding an additional song after them (I've even seen one where they hide the bonus track as track 69; I give my best Beavis style "heh heh, they said 69, heh heh" award to this band, who weren't notable enough in any other way for me to remember them). Anyway, if you read one of these track into a WAV file, all the pre-track information that had been stored in negative time shows up at the end of the previous track, which makes sense. That track will record on the CD-R as you would then expect, at the end of the previous track and with no special distinction or fancy timing footwork. Fine for those who just want to listen, but you're not going to have a perfect copy. This is quite alright by me, as I don't care what the display does as long as I can hear everything.