Originally Posted by
schmidj
The issues would appear to be in the digital players. I've never experimented with recording the output when you push "play". If you don't want some form of clicks, the player would need to fade in the audio of a ripped CD track when you play it. While audio engineers often do their digital edits at "zero crossings" of the waveform, which reduces, but by no means eliminates Fourier clicks, the closest point you can define for a track starting on a CD is one frame, 1/75th of a second, so the recording engineer really has no ability to control the track beginning to sample accuracy.
If your CD is individual tracks, you will have learned that most, if not all CD players mute the audio when paused or stopped, and fade it in, quite slowly, when you begin playing it. Therefore the beginning of a track, when your CD is of discrete tracks, had better be either silence or audio that will not appear upcut as the CD player begins playing it (such as applause or a fade-in). When I have mastered my location CDs, I have always left about .375 second of silence or such before the beginning of the track. On the occasions where I have accidentally left less, I've gotten complaints that some CD players upcut the track. Ripping any such track will not give you a Fourier click, but of course it is not gapless.
If you, after ripping, trim the silence off the beginning of the track (and if necessary off the end of the preceding track), to make the segue gapless, and don't crossfade the tracks, you may well get a Fourier click if you play the two tracks consecutively. You can avoid this possible click by in fact doing a brief crossfade between the tracks, instead of a hard edit. In fact most professional audio editing programs allow a default crossfade between clips edited together.
Now we have the concert recording. If played from the CD end to end, no clicks in the middle, the CD was recorded straight through, through the "pause" time and through the time before and after the track start "marker". If we play, on a CD player, a track from the middle, it will not have a click, because the track has been faded in by the player when I hit "play". But, whether I get a click when I hit "play" playing digital files depends on the design of the player. If the player is designed to begin playing with a fade, then you won't hear a click.
But now the concert recording played as digital files end to end. We have an issue. The CD was one giant "file", a continuous track. But the rip (or download) of it is individual files, one per "track". And when we put them together we have a dilemma. If we but them all together with no fades, they may or may not play through clean, depending on the design of the codec and the implementation of the player. We can give the appearance of a clean, clickless, gapless play by crossfading them, but when we do that, we are actually shortening the playback of the overall track by the length of the crossfade. When I edit audio, I'm careful to put that crossfade where it is inaudible, during applause or a momentary pause in the performance, or even between notes, and I listen to the result and move or change the edit until it in fact is inaudible. But your digital player doesn't have that option. It just either buts or crossfades the tracks. If the crossfade is in the middle of a note, you may well hear a glitch. If they but the tracks with no crossfade and you don't play them consecutively or the codec/player can't internally make a clean splice, you may hear a Fourier click a pop because the codec can't begin or end encoding cleanly, or a dropout if it is designed to cover those issues by fading in and out.
Interestingly, my audio editing software has a better solution that doesn't exist (AFAIK) in the consumer world. I can rip the CD "as one" from end to end as recorded, and then (and sometimes automatically) place "markers" into the file creating "regions" which are the same as the old tracks on the CD. Now if I want to play the whole concert, I just play the whole file. If I want one track, I play the region, If I want two or three consecutive tracks, I just play the consecutive regions. No pops, clicks, dropouts between track/regions. Unfortunately, the coding of the region markers is, AFAIK, not well standardized, it is proprietary to the editing software, although the different software companies seem to have some commonality, many of them do recognize the markers of competing software. But I've never seen consumer player software that recognizes these markers or offers any way to play regions from a CD length file. If that came about, it would provide a solution to your issue.