[phire]

> I wonder if that was a limitation they just couldn't quite make as seamless?

It's a fundamental limitation of CD audio. There isn't enough buffering to keep playing sound while the laser seeks to the next track, so there must be a gap. The gap isn't even predictable, the seek time will vary from drive to drive and even vary on the same drive.

With CD audio, your CD-ROM drive actually switches mode to become a regular CD player. The digital samples don't get sent to your sound card, the drive actually has all the electronics required to decode the digital audio and convert it to analog. All your sound card does is mix the analog output from your CD ROM drive with everything else.

The game can only really send "skip to track" style commands to the drive, more or less the same set of commands you could send with a proper CD player's remote.