Tedious is a polite way of wording it.


Some drives can read into the 'leadin', some can read into the 'leadout', some can do both, (most) can do neither. This is also called 'over reading'.

The leadin and leadout are parts of the audio CD required by the redbook standard and placed at the very beginning and very end of the audio respectively, as the names imply. When you rip a disk with correct offsets, your drive doesn't actually read into the leadin or leadout but it thinks it is doing one or the other because it has been told to apply an offset. For instance, if your read offset correction is +98 this tells your drive to start reading 98 samples ahead of usual. The drive therefore thinks that when it gets to the end of the disk it has to read 98 samples into the leadout before stopping. It's not really reading into the leadout but it thinks it is, so if the drive can't read into the leadout it won't be able to read those last 98 samples. If your drive can't read into the leadout set EAC to 'fill missing samples with silence'. Odds are that those missing 98 samples were silence anyway.

You can tell if your drive reads into the leadin or leadout from the tables, or you can tell by adjusting the offset and seeing if you get sync errors. If you have a positive offset correction and always get a sync error on the last track when you tell EAC to over read then your drive can't actually read into the leadout. Likewise if you have a negative offset correction and your drive can't read into the leadin, you will get sync errors on the first track if you tell EAC to over read. Note that there is only one setting for reading into both the leadin and leadout in EAC. So here's a summary:

- positive offset correction - drive must read into leadout - if it can't, turn off over reading and set to 'fill in missing samples with silence'

- negative offset correction - drive must read into leadin - if it can't, turn off over reading and set to 'fill in missing samples with silence'

Strictly speaking exact copies are NOT possible if the extracting drive cannot over read as required. This is most drives. Oh well.


This is only possible by looking up the values in the published tables or by using a proper EAC configuration disk, i.e. a disc published in the tables or one made on a computer with proper write offset. (There is a third way to determine your read offset using ADD or AAD CDs, but it is so incredibly complicated that I would recommend it to no one.)

This is indeed rare and shouldn't happen with newer drives, i.e. anything more than 3 years old.

I agree. If you don't know what your read offset correction is, don't guess. Set it to ZERO.

Write offset only matters for burning CDs, and combined offset is only for copying CDs when you don't know your read or write offsets (because you can calculate your combined offset from any CD).

From TTD's perspective all that matters is that the person who ripped a CD for torrenting here used the correct read offset (or used no read offset correction at all). NEVER use combined offset for ripping and torrenting files.

Provided the files were ripped with proper offsets you never have to worry about another person's offsets when you burn the files to CD on your own computer. In fact, you NEVER have to worry about that even if they used the wrong offsets. If they used the wrong offsets and actually lost audio samples, you can't get them back anyway. The only thing you need to be concerned about is if you notice that there is no silence at all at the beginning of the first track or the end of the last track. You could end up losing some of the audio if you burn without write offset correction or can't write into the leadin/leadout. And remember, you want a CD that can play in any CD player out there, and NONE of them use offset correction during playback. But there is a very simple solution: just add a second of pure digital silence to the very beginning and very end of the disc before burning. Even half a second will be more than sufficient since that equals 22,050 samples, which is way way more than any read or write offset that I have ever seen. But I always add one second if necessary since that entirely avoids creating an SBE issue. (Whatever amount you add, just make sure it's an integer multiple of 588.)