Why do recorders insert “00” bytes at the start of audio tracks?
This phenomenon is familiar to users who have attempted to extract digital audio from a CD-R. Very often the result of copying an audio CD is an exact copy of the original audio data, but with a few hundred zero bytes inserted at the front (and a corresponding number lost off the end). Since this represents the addition of perhaps 1/100th of a second of silence at the start of the disc, it’s not really noticeable. The actual number of bytes inserted may very slightly from disc to disc, but a given recorder usually inserts about the same number. It’s usually less than one sector (2352 bytes). According to a message from a Yamaha engineer, the cause of the problem is the lack of synchronization between the audio data and the subcode channels, much like the “jitter” described in section (2-15). The same data flow problems that make it hard to find the start of a block when reading also make it hard to write the data and identifying information in sync.
