[Five]

Originally Posted by feralicious

What confuses me to this day is how to burn audio CDs with someone else's offset? I've looked for an answer a while ago and never found one. I believe you still use your drive's write offset since the read offsets are to correct whatever "inaccuracy" your drive does on audio cds due to not being able to easily locate sectors on audio cds.

As I understand it, with separate read and write offsets this means that any cd ripped with EAC with the read offsets corrected can be written as an exact audio copy on any drive with the write offsets corrected (for that specific drive). If you have a drive that forces you to use a combined read/write offset it is not possible to make exact audio copies unless you do it on your computer only. I think this ties in the the Lead-In and Lead-Out stuff.

Originally Posted by feralicious

Another tip for anyone just configuring your drive. After you've spent 3-4 hours hunting through your CD collection to find CDs that match their database as the correct pressings for testing your drive's offsets, make a note on which CDs they were. I can't remember which ones worked for me and I have a feeling that the drive I have all configured is on its last legs. Which means I have to go throught the whole process all over again when I buy a new drive. Wish I knew which CDs those were....

I remember what worked on mine... Led Zeppelin BBC Sessions! You're supposed to test with more than one disc, so this one works great since it's a 2cd set. I should probably also mention that mine is the Canadian pressing. Also a great listen fwiw.

Originally Posted by feralicious

Oh, and also write down your read, write and combined offset numbers with the CD names in case you have a bad computer day and you lose your C drive.

Now this is some good advice! *gets pencil and paper out*

Originally Posted by tgc225

Thanks for the info. I think the most reasonable explanation when it comes to incorrect offsets is that someone bought a new drive but didn't bother to change the offset value. For a few boots that I checked, while the offset value didn't match the drive that was in the log, it did match other drives in the database.

This theory makes sense. It seems like a pretty obvious mistake to avoid, but I could see this happening to ppl who configured EAC a couple years back and have since forgotten everything except "I did it".