I just bought a CD which contains three very long tracks. I want to burn a CD containing these three tracks but with markers added to each track so I can listen to them in chunks. (The music is pretty intense and I wouldn’t always want to listen to each track in its entirety at one sitting, still less the whole CD!) To make myself clearer, I don’t want to create new tracks as such, I just want to create markers at intervals throughout the tracks e.g. every seven minutes or whatever, so I can still have the uninterrupted flow of the whole track.
Since trying to find the right explanation of what I want to do has led to lots of fruitless Google searches, might be best to give an example.
I had a Klaus Schulze CD called ‘Babel’ which last 40 plus minutes. It contains about 10 tracks I think but the music is just one continuous piece. Occasionally I wanted to listen to certain tracks but my version of the CD had no actual tracks even though they were listed on the CD cover. Inserting the CD in my player therefore indicated there was only one track on the CD. I therefore used an Alesis HDD recorder to record the CD and manually add the tracks where they were supposed to be. However this was pretty time consuming and not that straightforward so I thought it must be easier to do on a PC…!
The sections have to be CD tracks if you expect your CD player to jump from one to the other. But you can generally speaking make these tracks gapless, subject to the capabilities of your CD burner and CD player.
As far as I know the only way to get truly gap-less (and glitch less) CD tracks is to
use CD writing software that supports working with a single wav file plus “cue sheet”.
There is a program available called “wave repair” that has good features for splitting wav
files into CD tracks and exporting the necessary “cue sheet”. However it isn’t free. (but at $30
it’s pretty cheap). It’s also windows only unfortunately.
This also depends on your CD burning software supporting this mode of burning audio
CDs (wave file plus queue sheet).
The other method (as documented in the wiki page Gale pointed you to) is to split the
tracks into separate wav files and then tell your CD burner program to “record
without gaps” This will be close, but if the tracks are not cut on CD block boundaries
(1/75’th of second) there will be small discontinuities at the track boundaries, which
you may or may not notice.
Perhaps the case many years ago, but there have been programs available for many years that are able to write gapless CDs without requiring the user to manually create a Cue Sheet. Two common examples for Windows are Nero (commercial non-free) and CDBurnerXP (free). However, in order to make a gapless CD, the CD burning drive (hardware) needs to be able to write in DAO mode (Disk At Once). On Linux, Brassero and K3B are popular graphical CD burning applications that can produce gapless CDs (subject to suitable hardware). I presume that there are also applications available for Mac OS X.
As far as I can tell (but I can’t prove it), Roxio Toast will burn a gapless CD in disk-at-once mode without requiring that the tracks be cut on exact CD frame boundaries.
That said, it certainly can’t hurt to set Audacity to Snap To CDDA frames when marking the track boundaries.