====== Enhanced Gap-Mastering Support ======

//19 February 2002//

Different systems and disk drives may each give a slightly different writing capacity and so special [[:glossary:gap|gap]] "indicators" are put on the [[:glossary:track|tracks]] by the mastering equipment to compensate for these different track lengths. The gap support in our analyser changed slightly to compensate for this and it makes sense that our mastering software should test the writing capacity. This is actually the only modifiable parameter that does not change data content (except for some [[:glossary:copy protection|protections]], but they will have their own descriptors), it will just vary the gap size accordingly during writing.

  * **Without appropriate hardware** we can shorten the gap size to make a [[:glossary:long track|long track]] writable - but only if the long track is not fully utilised with actual game data. This is not a rare case - we see it quite often.
  * **With appropriate hardware** we can use the original gap size, to give a fully authentic write.

The mastering software will need to know what part of the track description is the gap, so now it has a special marker.