courtesy of Phixion.
All optical drives have read and write offsets. If you want to burn a CD bit perfect from .cue you need to find your write offset. There are a few ways of finding this information but I’ll talk you through the easiest way.
To do this, open EAC and navigate to:
EAC > Drive Options > Writer
Here you will see you can ‘Create Offset Test CD’, before doing so, make sure you have your drives correct Read Offset in the Offset / Speed tab. I use AccurateRip to detect mine, it’s very important that this number is correct before trying to find your Write Offset.
Go back to the ‘Writer’ tab and Insert a blank CD-R or preferably a CD-RW, make sure your ‘Write Samples Offset’ is set at 0. Now press ‘Create Offset Test CD’.
Now you need to go back to the Speed / Offset tab and if on, temporarily disable AccurateRip by unchecking ‘Use AccurateRip with this drive’.
Now press ‘Detect read sample offset correction…’
As you can see, I get +66, this is the sum of my Read and Write offset combined. Now I know from AccurateRip that my drives Read Offset is +48, which must make my Write Offset +18 (+48 + +18 = +66). Enter these figures into the relevant boxes and discard the CD-R you used for the test.
Now with a new CD-R, repeat the process this time with the correct Read and Write offsets.
After making a new Offset Test CD, go back to the Offset / Speed tab and ‘Detect read sample offset correction…’, you should get the correct figure for your drive, in my case +48. This CD can now be used to determine the read offset of any drive.
You can now be confident that whatever you burn in EAC is as accurate as possible, remember to burn with the .cue sheet!
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