CD burning: custom gaps between tracks?

[Reading Bug]

Is there software for burning audio CDs that allows you to customize the gaps between the tracks i.e. 2 secs after track 1, 3 secs after track 2, etc? If this can be done via playlists, such as M3U files, is there documentation describing how to set gaps as part of the script? I haven't seen anything.

I have a few albums I'm more or less professionally producing and I'd like this option as I seem to remember being able to do this many years ago. Adding silence to the end of the tracks to burn a gapless disc is not preferred. Thanks in advance.

[Cornucopia]

Get a burning app that does DAO (Disc-at-Once), or SAO (session...), and allows for cue sheets - it should allow for various gap lengths including gapless. CdrWin, cdrcue, Eac, all used to be able to do it. And I would bet that if you manually edit a cue sheet in a text editor, you can probably get imgburn to work as well. The full blown old nero & roxio apps used to do it decently also.

It's a little bit harder to find them now since CD has faded, but they're still out there.


Scott

[october262]

Is there software for burning audio CDs that allows you to customize the gaps between the tracks i.e. 2 secs after track 1, 3 secs after track 2, etc? If this can be done via playlists, such as M3U files, is there documentation describing how to set gaps as part of the script? I haven't seen anything.

I have a few albums I'm more or less professionally producing and I'd like this option as I seem to remember being able to do this many years ago. Adding silence to the end of the tracks to burn a gapless disc is not preferred. Thanks in advance.

try with Audacity - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySt3cxZrEVY

[Reading Bug]

Get a burning app that does DAO (Disc-at-Once), or SAO (session...), and allows for cue sheets - it should allow for various gap lengths including gapless. CdrWin, cdrcue, Eac, all used to be able to do it. And I would bet that if you manually edit a cue sheet in a text editor, you can probably get imgburn to work as well. The full blown old nero & roxio apps used to do it decently also.

It's a little bit harder to find them now since CD has faded, but they're still out there.


Scott

Thanks Scott, but one thing I should have made clear. The discs I want to burn are transfers from vinyl. There is no source CD to rip and save a cue sheet, so I'd need to either create a cue sheet or use software with the option to set gaps. Is that possible from among your suggestions? It looks like CDRCue might work, if it works on Windows 10.

[Reading Bug]

It looks like CDRCue will do what I want. I don't think a paid version is available anymore so I have to work with the evaluation version, which limits tracks to 10. But I can edit a few lists into one via plain text editor, so no biggie. I think I'll try EAC and will report back if I run into issues when burning. Thanks.

[Reading Bug]

I have a few albums I'm more or less professionally producing and I'd like this option as I seem to remember being able to do this many years ago. Adding silence to the end of the tracks to burn a gapless disc is not preferred. Thanks in advance.

In my research I discovered my memory was not failing me. You could customize gap lengths with Easy CD Creator. Back in the day our version came from Adaptec!

[davexnet]

Another option is IMGburn, recommended app back in the day. Set write mode, then create cue sheet.
Drag in your files, select each item to set individual gap, or "Session" to set it for all.
CD text likewise

[Cornucopia]

Regardless of the app, the write mode MUST be DAO or SAO in order to have custom gaps <2sec including gapless.
TAO requires 2+secs gaps due to the nature of how it writes.

Scott

[Reading Bug]

I've finally started burning discs for this project using CDBurnerXP, which worked great for one disc that wouldn't properly burn gapless in other programs. But I'm now burning discs with custom gaps and have discovered that "pregap," at least using CDBurnerXP, means adding silence to the beginning of a track - altering their lengths and forcing a delay on the beginning of the music. Certainly not what I expected "pregap" to mean.

Is there a program that actually adds gaps between tracks, such as -0:02 or -0:01, instead of altering the tracks themselves? And of course still allows customized gap lengths? So far I don't see any clear answers researching this for myself. Thanks.

[TubeBar]

It's been a while since I've done anything w/ CDs but I stopped using the CD Pause which is just a flag. It's easier to load up ALL your tracks in your Fav editor and line them up, decide what you want the pauses to be. After that simply hard code silence to the tracks start or end as needed. Burn the CD w/o any gaps. The advantage to that is when the files are ripped to digital playlist the gaps will still be present, as not all software will convert CD Gap flags to silence and digital playlist will be off.

[TubeBar]

I've finally started burning discs for this project using CDBurnerXP, which worked great for one disc that wouldn't properly burn gapless in other programs. But I'm now burning discs with custom gaps and have discovered that "pregap," at least using CDBurnerXP, means adding silence to the beginning of a track - altering their lengths and forcing a delay on the beginning of the music. Certainly not what I expected "pregap" to mean.

Is there a program that actually adds gaps between tracks, such as -0:02 or -0:01, instead of altering the tracks themselves? And of course still allows customized gap lengths? So far I don't see any clear answers researching this for myself. Thanks.

I've done it a few times and as I said don't recommend it except for extreme cases where you max out the CD and hard coded silence would be overburn.

You need a cue sheet editor like https://cuemaster.org/ and once you generate your cue sheet you can load that up in Nero or IMGburn, as was said you need to burn it as DAO. Never burn CDs any other way except multi-session think requires SAO.

[Reading Bug]

I've done it a few times and as I said don't recommend it except for extreme cases where you max out the CD and hard coded silence would be overburn.

You need a cue sheet editor like https://cuemaster.org/ and once you generate your cue sheet you can load that up in Nero or IMGburn, as was said you need to burn it as DAO. Never burn CDs any other way except multi-session think requires SAO.

Thanks! The problem was I wasn't burning DAO. I saw the note earlier but didn't appreciate what it meant frankly. DAO on Imgburn is working like a charm so far.

Some albums have already been burned without gaps, but for the others I'd like the ability to customize them for flow without being "locked in" to the chronological program. I also have more than one program on some discs so want to be able to vary the pregaps. These are albums for which the tracks have been ripped or transferred from vinyl, so there is either no source CD or I'm wanting to make small changes to the original CD authoring.

Thanks again!

[TubeBar]

I've done it a few times and as I said don't recommend it except for extreme cases where you max out the CD and hard coded silence would be overburn.

You need a cue sheet editor like https://cuemaster.org/ and once you generate your cue sheet you can load that up in Nero or IMGburn, as was said you need to burn it as DAO. Never burn CDs any other way except multi-session think requires SAO.

Thanks! The problem was I wasn't burning DAO. I saw the note earlier but didn't appreciate what it meant frankly. DAO on Imgburn is working like a charm so far.

Some albums have already been burned without gaps, but for the others I'd like the ability to customize them for flow without being "locked in" to the chronological program. I also have more than one program on some discs so want to be able to vary the pregaps. These are albums for which the tracks have been ripped or transferred from vinyl, so there is either no source CD or I'm wanting to make small changes to the original CD authoring.

Thanks again!

Glad you got it working and problem solved. Keep in mind ripping the CD to digital files and creating a playlist will be missing the gaps so this is pretty much CD only deal as far as your pauses are concerned. Though some programs may copy the gaps and add it as silence into the audio not really sure as I never used one but most don't. It's a pain if you want a perfect digital rip w/ a playlist of a specific album and why I never used gaps. Adding silence was just as easy to do and you can preview exactly how it sounds whereas gaps are a bit of guess work.