Red book and non standard pause times

[huejahfink]

I've been sending CDs off to press with 0 pause between tracks for years and never had any complaints.
I'm just wondering about adding a pause of longer than 2 seconds between two tracks.
I have an album in prep at the moment and the artist says that there are two distinct movements.
I wish to add a pause time of about 5 seconds to separate them, whilst not adding actual silence to the previous track itself.

Any reason why I should not do this? I'm using Sony CD Architect to lay out my production masters.

Thanks for any help you can give.

[24-96 Mastering]

Originally Posted by huejahfink

I wish to add a pause time of about 5 seconds to separate them, whilst not adding actual silence to the previous track itself.

Any reason why I should not do this?

There's no reason why you shouldn't do this.

[huejahfink]

Thanks for your advice, Robin.

I'll take this as a go-ahead unless anyone else wants to chime in?

[Dave Rose]

Go ahead! I put 10 seconds in the other day....honestly'

[haberdasher]

edit: not true, apparently.

[philip]

Originally Posted by haberdasher

The only limitation is that you can't have a pause of between 0 and 2 seconds. Two or more seconds is fine in the spec.

really?

[GeorgeZ]

Originally Posted by haberdasher

The only limitation is that you can't have a pause of between 0 and 2 seconds. Two or more seconds is fine in the spec.

Could you mention any specification requiring this?

We produce CDs for EMI, Sony or Universal, often from original DDPs and some of them have pauses between 0-2 sec. No problem in Eclipse with these.

Of course there is no reason to encode pauses less than 1 second because such a pause won't be properly displayed on most standalone CD players - showing only -0:00 and then the next track will start from 0:00. But often they are automatically encoded by some software so we leave them there.

I think that audio should not be present in pauses, but it is only my personal opinion. Also because there are some ripping utilities and applications that can be set up to skip the pause and then the audio will be missing in the resulting wav/mp3.

[24-96 Mastering]

Originally Posted by haberdasher

The only limitation is that you can't have a pause of between 0 and 2 seconds. Two or more seconds is fine in the spec.

Originally Posted by philip

really?

No.

[haberdasher]

Oh? In that case, it must be a limit in certain software.

If there's a track stop mark less than two seconds before a track start mark then Sonic HD (and Pyramix 5?) silently removes the track stop mark so there's a zero-second pause.

I think they both keep displaying them in the EDL/timeline, but don't actually burn to CD. You can check by looking at the PQ log or doing a loadback. Sorry for spreading misinformation if I am!

[Petrus]

I have been doing zero pauses between sections in a piece, and standard 2 second pauses between each piece (classical), and those are always with hall ambience. If I need longer pauses I just extend the tail of the previous track. Software is either CD-Architect or Wave Editor (for DDP). I have been paying attention to classical disks I have and also the major labels have often much longer "non-standard" countdowns, even up to 17 seconds, between major works. So apperently having longer than 2 second pauses work fine, even with ambience playing in the backgound.

How the rippers handle those is another matter, they are not designed with classical disks in mind anyway.

[trmchenry]

Index 0 or the Pregap of track 1 has to have at least a 2 second pause. After that it's fair game to have pauses of whatever length you want.

[jayfrigo]

There is a red book limitation of 4 seconds minimum track length, but pauses can be anywhere from non-existent to seventy something minutes. Red book does not require a track pause (index 0 [zero] often called an "end ID"). In cases when one uses only an index 1 (start ID), the previous track ends when the new start ID is encountered rather than at index 0, or the end ID.

It is quite common these days for CDs to have no pauses, so the CD counter doesn't give you that negative countdown to the beginning of the next track. For tracks that are crossfaded, there is no other way but to simply use a start ID and skip the pause.

[huejahfink]

Thanks so much everybody for your help!