EAC and cue sheet/gap detection
Reply #4 –
Gap detection may be something you want to do if you are, as you say,
Based on what you wrote, did you want to say gap may not be something you want to do? Perhaps you really meant to say CUE sheets and not gap detection???
1. not interested in making exact copies of full CDs
Telling EAC to perform gap detection is not necessary for making exact copies of full CDs. If you meant CUE sheets, they are still not always necessary.
2. you want those ripped tracks to not have the usual 2+ seconds of "silence" tacked onto the ends (if that's how they are on the original CD)
I would not characterize the area flagged with a 00 index this way. This area may be silence, it may be low-level noise, it may be audio. It may be 2+ seconds long, it may be less than 2 seconds long, it may not even be flagged at all.
3. you're OK with giving up the ability to use AccurateRip to check if your rip matches other people's
Unless you're placing gaps at the beginning of ripped tracks or eliminating them (provided they consist of nothing more than null samples!), gap detection is not necessary for AR verification. Even still, it is the CUE sheet that is required, not gap detection. You don't need to tell EAC to perform gap detection in order to create a CUE sheet. It will be done automatically.
EDIT: Reading this over for a third time, now I'm wondering if you meant to say these three things are the result of telling EAC to rip tracks with gaps left out.
This is why there's an option to test detected gaps to see how silent they really are
I went just back and re-tested this function to confirm that it can report a gap as having 100% silence when it actually contains non-null samples. It is not to be trusted!!!
Back on this notion of why telling EAC to perform gap detection (F4) is necessary:
- It is necessary if you want EAC to rip without gaps or put them at the beginning of the current track.
- It is necessary if you want the gap information shown in the GUI or in the log file.
- It is necessary if you want EAC to test gaps for silence (which is not reliable!).
Besides these three, there are no other reasons to explicitly tell EAC to perform gap detection.