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CD Audio Indices?

Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2003 11:35 am
by Mike
I have a few CD's where the liner notes have specific indices marked on them, e.g.

Track Title - 3:32
Index 1: Announcements
Index 2: Introduction
Index 3: Music

The two albums I can think of right now that have examples of this are Duke Ellington: Live and Rare, and Lester Young with the Oscar Peterson Trio. I thought these were just liner notations until Rayned told me he once had a CD player that had controls to actually skip directly to these indices. Does anyone know of any cd player application, PC or otherwise, that can read these? Or better yet a CD ripper that can extract them? It seems all I can find on the subject is for CD burners, that support writing of them, but nothing about any programs that can read them.

Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2003 2:26 pm
by CafeSavoy
it's a JVC, i think the model is XL-Z331. the index control was on the remote control device.

Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2003 3:56 pm
by GemZombie
Indeces are in the CD-ROM Audio Spec, but not many players implemented them (I guess it's sort of confusing for the user).

I remember the first sony CD players had support for it

Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2003 5:47 pm
by CafeSavoy
that would be funny if only earlier players had a more advanced feature.

Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2003 11:07 am
by Ron
Yeah, my 1st CD player back in '85? had that feature. It was pretty obscure. Hardly any CDs had the indexing, so why have the useless button?

Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2003 11:33 am
by GemZombie
CafeSavoy wrote:that would be funny if only earlier players had a more advanced feature.
Then laugh, cuz 'tis true :)

Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2003 11:45 am
by KevinSchaper
ohhh, so that's why they thought it made sense to load down Two to Tango with all that extra studio stuff so you gotta jump to 3:16 remaining (memorized!) to play the actual track..

I've got an old sony es single disc that can do indexes - I'll hafta try it..

Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2003 11:55 am
by Mike
OK, after a little more research, the new version of Exact Audio Copy will generate something called a "cue sheet" for you when you rip a CD. This extracts and writes out all indices (as well as other useful info) to a file, which is usually used to make an exact copy of the disc later on.

Still no word on any computer apps that can skip directly to an index.

Posted: Fri Mar 21, 2003 9:22 pm
by Lawrence
I did not know about the index feature on earlier players. Perhaps it was a feature that they eliminated as the cost went down.

You could also use Nero (or a similar burning program) to edit the track length and eliminate the introductions on your DJ copy so you do not even need the cue sheet. Or you can use Nero to simply split the track into seperate tracks at those index points if you want to keep them all.

I have a few CDs of live shows where the editors did not insert a track mark in between songs. No index splitting the track into two was indicated on the liner notes: just both songs listed on the same track as if it was a medlay, even though it wasn't. I used Nero to split them up and manually edited the track list accordingly.

I've also used Nero to edit track lengths so as to eliminate lengthy, undanceable musical ad lib intros to songs of over 30 seconds.

Posted: Sat Apr 05, 2003 9:54 am
by szarka
AFAIK, the only CD players I've used that could cue to the index were some sweet ones--I think from Denon--that were designed for broadcast applications. They would also cue to the freakin' millisecond, which is great for comedy and stuff--seems it's harder to cue accurately with typical home units and even many DJ units than it would be on a turntable. Unfortunately, use and abuse took their toll on those units and the radio station has since had to replace them with something not nearly as nice. :(

Strangely, I think the home units by Sony that I've owned display the index position but can't cue to it.