Thanks for all the good dialog.

Best of luck with the project, konradh!

Let us know when is ready for sale/download.

There is nothing in the Red Book standard regarding gaps between songs, only the requirement that there be 2 seconds of silence before the first song.

Don't forget the creative possibilities of varying the gap or eliminating it altogether. A standard technique is to count off a measure at the tempo of the previous song and start the next song on the imaginary downbeat. Or, if two songs are in the same key like all of the Coffee House Band's, run them together and let the second song fade in as the first one's fading out. Such things were novel back when the Moody Blues first did it, back when you had to use razor blades on tape, but nowadays it's a piece o' cake. Still effective, though.

CD Architect won't let you burn a CD w/o the two seconds at the start of the thing.  I know, I've pulled my start song there before.  The 2 seconds is automatically inserted. 

If you are sending a CD off for replication CDA is well worth the investment.

Another +1 for CD Architect, one of my top 3 software purchases

bitflipper, Thanks for the Red Book clarification and thoughts.

Everyone else, Thanks for the suggestions and recommendations.

Strnagely, this hasn't come up since I've been on X1.  Some older projects were mastered on DAT (and 1/4" with leader tape before that!).  Then I did some things on a VS-1680 and assembled the master CD there.  My most recent project was producing an alternative rock band in another studio and the engineer there handled this aspect.  This is actually my first X1 in-the-box project for sale.

+1

bitflipper


There is nothing in the Red Book standard regarding gaps between songs, only the requirement that there be 2 seconds of silence before the first song.

Don't forget the creative possibilities of varying the gap or eliminating it altogether. A standard technique is to count off a measure at the tempo of the previous song and start the next song on the imaginary downbeat. Or, if two songs are in the same key like all of the Coffee House Band's, run them together and let the second song fade in as the first one's fading out. Such things were novel back when the Moody Blues first did it, back when you had to use razor blades on tape, but nowadays it's a piece o' cake. Still effective, though.

There is nothing in the Red Book standard regarding gaps between songs, only the requirement that there be 2 seconds of silence before the first song.

Yeah, the 2-second gap became "common" because some of the limited apps (Nero) automatically put a 2-second gap between tunes.


Pro level burning apps (CD Architect, Samplitude, Wavelab) will let you layout the tunes anyway you choose.

There's a practical reason for the 2-second gap between songs. There is no physical index on the CD that allows the player to seek precisely to an arbitrary position on the disk. Rather, there is only a table of contents that lists the time offsets of each song and it's up to the CD mechanism to approximate where playback should start. CD players are generally not precision devices, and can only find that spot within plus or minus 1 second.

I still prefer gapless and variable-gap layouts, though. It's a little reward for those listeners who don't use random-play but listen to the album front to back as intended.

isn't the redbook standard to have 4 seconds between?

No, not at all. You use what ever make the album flow the best. if that means 2 seconds for one song and a half second for another song. Then that is what you do.
 
Red book doesn't decide the silence between your songs, you do... Red book are standards for playback
The only 2 second gap you need is right before the 1st song plays. That is a red book standard, but what happens between your songs is up to you and only you.
Cj