Optical Recording from the PC

[BLC]

Hello all

I've not been able to find any definitive answer on this, despite all my searching, but if this has been answered before then please feel free to point me in the right direction!

Back in the days of my first MD portables, I had no PC equipment that could output over optical; to get the best possible quality I needed to use a CD player. It's now nearly 15 years later and things have somewhat changed; I have a Behringer UCA202 USB Audio interface for the PC which, in addition to 2in/out RCA jacks, has a TOSLink optical out connection. However if I use this as a recording source for my Sony MZ-N710, it will not automatically write track marks.

I have quite a bit of music stored on the PC in FLAC format, ripped from CDs which are now tucked away in storage (and rather awkward for me to get access to). I don't want to have to automatically insert 2/4-second gaps at the end of each track for the MD to recognise the new track, as that totally spoils transitions between songs. This is a NetMD recorder, but I'd much prefer to use an optical cable - the difference between SP and LP2 may be negligible, but I'd still prefer to use SP recording (which rules out SonicStage).

I did try recording some of the albums back to a blank CD and record from my HiFi - which does output track marks over optical - but my HiFi wouldn't recognise the discs properly (it only saw one long audio track, whereas the PC sees multiple tracks).

Is it possible at all to automatically record track marks when recording via optical from a PC? Is this a hardware limitation or is it software? Do I need specific hardware or software?

I'm quite ready to tear out some hair over this... You would think that with the computer technology we have now it would be a simple proposition; oh no, of course not, where's the fun in everything being simple...

[THIS SUCKS]

use winamp with wincue to add a delay between tracks. set it to 3 seconds. if it makes extra zero length tracks between the real ones just delete them with sonic stage.