I was listening to the empeg on shuffle this morning and it chose to play U2's "Exit" off of The Joshua Tree. I knew it before, but it's more prominent when shuffled: whoever mastered the CD put the break between "One Tree Hill" and "Exit" in the wrong place so that you get "One Tree Hill"'s coda as an intro to "Exit" instead.

Does anyone have a newer version of the CD (I probably got mine in '87 or '88)? If so, is the break point fixed?

On a related subject, the UK pressing of Joshua Tree appears to be unrippable. My original copy was unrippable, put it down to cd rot (it is one of my few visibly decayed discs).

I bought another copy, that failed to rip in the same places. Bought another copy, same result.

That was with EAC and dbPowerAmp across three machines/drives. In the end I was forced to "steal" a good rip from somewhere.

Forgot to say, the rip that I acquired has the break in the right place.

My rip doesn't have that problem, but I can't tell you when I purchased the CD, though it would have been more than 15 years ago, that's for sure. It might be original pressing and it might not. I can tell you however that it's a Canadian pressing.

Sounds like a few minutes in Audacity would fix what you've got on hand.

*shrug*

Oh, no doubt. I've been meaning to do it; I'm just too lazy.

I was mostly just curious.

Cue sheet issues (where an incorrect CD track designator mark would be induced) are common in CD mastering. It's possible that one pressing of the CD has the error in the cue sheet and another pressing does not. This probably was either induced or corrected at some point during the album's history when it got remastered for some reason.

The first CD player I ever bought, I had to have Moving Pictures for it of course. And the first CD pressing of Moving Pictures also had a cue sheet error. The opening 1000 milliseconds of "Tom Sawyer" was cut off. I sent a letter to the record company (this was in the days before ubiquitous email) and they corrected it fairly shortly thereafter, and I got a new disc.

This caused an unexpected bit of trouble recently, my friend Jeff Bohnhoff recorded a parody album which included a Tom Sawyer parody. His reference material was an uncorrected copy of the same first-release CD, so when he sent me an early mix of the song to review (I'm his rush SME it seems!) I had to point out he didn't have the the drum hits on the opening downbeat correct. He fixed it. :-)

1000ms = 1s

I was trying to get past the English language awkwardness of saying "First Second" because of the dual meaning of the word Second.

"The first one second."

---- "Oh yeah buddy? Up yours, the second one first!"

"That's what I said dumb-ass".

I think that's how the war in Iraq was started...