Gaps and CUE Sheets
It seems that people can never get perfect enough rip :)
We're getting weird amounts of mail asking us to include explanations and tutorials on CUE sheets in our FLAC ripping guides.
We originally intended to put up CUE sheets guides with image creation guide, where in our opinion CUE sheets make sense, but it's obvious that good number of you wants to use them with split FLAC files.
Let us first address what you get with CUE sheets. You get control of gaps. Yeah, gaps, those little silent parts between songs. It is often claimed that to get a perfect copy of your original audio CD you have to use CUE sheets.
Now let's address this a bit. While we strive for music perfection by promoting FLAC we find little enthusiasm for perfect/identical audio CD recreation from FLAC files. Firstly because we consider FLAC superior to old and obsolete audio CD format, and secondly the identical copy of an audio CD can only satisfy a music pirate, hardly a die hard fan, who would buy original CD in the first place.
On the other hand, we surely can understand a reason to recreate audio CD's for playback in old stereos that don't support other formats.
But just how identical your CD has to be?
Let us get back to gaps. One thing that is obviously not clear to many of you, is that, by following our guides, even without CUE sheets, you DO indeed preserve gaps. They are added to the end of your files during the extraction. It is the best way to preserve gaps. If you play back those files you will hear EXACTLY what you hear from the audio CD. If you burn them to audio CD and play it, you will hear exactly the same thing as from the original CD. It will play the same thing when you skip tracks too.
Only thing that will be different is the time counter on standalone players that will count time for whole track with gap as one, while it would reset on gap on original CD.
Anyway, for those of you that plan to recreate audio CD's from your FLAC files, and than play it in standalone player with display and watch it while it changes tracks and are annoyed if it doesn't reset on gap but on next song here comes the solution :)
Guide
In EAC click Action\Create CUE Sheet\Multiple WAV Files With Gaps... (Noncompliant) (Screenshot)
If EAC hangs on particular track during gap detection, try changing EAC/Drive Options/Gap Detection/Detection Method to A or C
Uh, that was short :)
Take a note of that "Noncompliant" part, it means that it's not by standards, you should make sure you burn disk with software that can read this type of CUE sheets (like EAC).
