On Tue, 18 Nov 2003 00:17:51 GMT, J. Joyce
wrote:

OK, I'm stumped. In my whole collection of CDs I have three or four
that when you put the CD in the player, they start off with a negative
countdown on track one. This is NOT after hitting the rewind button.
Obviously this is diffrent from the countdown between tracks which is
common. TOC reveals nothing unusual, and
when I copy the CD I get the negative countdown on track one, but I
cannot reproduce the effect on other CDs. Anyone know the trick?

This is intriguing. As you probably know, the countdown between tracks
N and N+1 starts at index 0 of track N+1, and finishes as index 1 of
N+1 is reached. Now, an audio CD player is supposed to start playing a
disc at index 1 of track 1. So in theory you should never see it
playing index 0 of track 1 (unless you rewind into it). I can't think
of any way that a mis-mastering of a CD would exhibit this behaviour.
Some hypotheses (guesses, actually) follow:

1. Audio CDs normally have a 2 second pregap prior to track 1. Perhaps
your CD player is non-standard and just starting 2 seconds into the
data stream instead of going to track 1, index 1. In that case, a CD
with a greater than 2 second pregap would show a countdown. To check
this, try playing those particular CDs on other CD players to see if
they also show a countdown.

2. Some mixed-mode CDs have a data track as track 1, and the audio
only starts at track 2. Audio players should ignore the data track and
start playing at track 2. I don't know whether in this case they will
skip to index 1 of track 2, or whether they would start at index 0
(and hence show a countdown).