Thank you Brian...
I thought I had this FLAC thing down...downloaded Frontend and thought I was doing well but I don't align sector boundaries or make fingerprints...so now I am all confused again...(edit: Does anyone know of any resources that would help me out with this...?)
OK a little more details on the whole Sector Boundary thing. As has already been mentioned, you should not have to worry about this.
But here is some more info, about all you really need to know:
Sector Boundaries Errors can be confusing but the good news is you should not have to worry about it in practice.
Here is the practical stuff - really simple.
FLAC Frontend is kind of weird about sector boundary alignment. I've encoded files that were originally tracked in CDWave with the alignment option enabled in FLAC Frontend, and it has given me SBE warnings. Don't know the program so I don't know why. I do know this from experience:
1) Track your wavs in CDWave, and they will definitely be sector boundary aligned, no worries about the details on your part. It does it automatically.
2) Just turn the alignment option off in FLAC Frontend. CDWave has already done it right for you. With the option off, the FLAC encoded files will still be sector boundary aligned.
Do that, and you are golden without having to even know what a sector boundary is.
But if you want to know a little more:
Where sector boundaries come from is the Redbook CD standard.
By convention a CD breaks things up into "blocks". A block contains 1/75 of a second of music. A block also contains 588 samples. So from the beginning of the wav you will have units of 588 samples/block. But now you want to split a big wav into tracks. You decide some time, say ~5:00 minutes to split the second track from the first. How do you know the place you decided to split is an exact multiple of 588 from where the track started? You probably don't, but a CD cannot write a partial block, and a new track must always start on a new block. Say you split the file in the middle of the last block. The last block of the first track will have 294 samples of music - data - before the cut. But the CD does not allow writing only a half block - it has to finish in full blocks with 588 always. So second half of the 294 samples of the last block gets padded with null data, and the second track starts on the next block at 0 again.
In the worse case you might have audible artifacts from that last half a block of no data. It might be too short to notice, but it is still a problem, because say you need to track out the same file again later. You cut it at ~5:00 again. But this time did you actually split the file at 293 samples or 295 samples instead of exactly 294? That is definitely not an audible difference, but it does mean you cannot match the original checksums for the original tracks you cut because the data is not *exactly* the same.
Enter CDWave. You say "OK I want track 1 to end at 5:00 and track 2 to start right after". CDWave says "No what you really want is track 1 to be sector boundary aligned, i.e it should end exactly on the *full block* of 588 samples nearest 5:00 so track 2 can start on exactly the next block, with no null data having to be added". You say "OK, whatever, please handle that detail for me". And it does. It's that simple. Track your stuff in CDWave (or some other program that does automatic SB alignment, encode it in FLAC Frontend without the alignment option, and don't worry about it further.