I've seen it. I always figured it was a mistake in the CD creation process.

How would it help you? If you're looking for a good way to be able to cue up the next track, start your track at the beginning of the music. Then you can use the pause function on the CD player and advance to that track. When you start playing again, you'll start at the beginning of the music. Is this close enough?

I don't use Vegas to make audio CDs. I do, however, run a full time professional music production studio and know how to do what you are asking.

The "negative time" you see on CDs is the time in the "pause" region between tracks. When you create the index markers for a CD, most simple CD burning programs just create track boundary markers. The better CD mastering programs allow you to actually specify the track start and track end for each index. If you leave some space between the track end marker of one index (song), and the track start marker of the next index (song), then that blank space in between is considered a pause region, and most CD players will count down the time of the pause region until the next track starts. It's similar to having the default 2 second pause region that is required at the beginning of a CD (although CD players automatically skip this and start right at the first track).

You used to be able to do this with Sonic Foundry's CD Architect, but that program was discontinued. I now use Steinberg's Wavelab 3 with its Audio Montage to set up the master CD layout. It's the best software I know of at the time for creating master CDs for duplication since you can layout your CD EXACTLY the way you want it, and can even have multiple tracks of audio that will all be mixed together as the CD is burning, and you can have master plug-ins running at the same time that will be applied to the audio as it is burned to CD.

I'm not sure how you create CD layouts in Vegas since I'm not using it for audio work, but hopefully with this explanation you will have an idea about how it should be set up and then you can see if it is possible to do it in Vegas or not. Basically, see what type of markers Vegas lets you create for CD indexes, and try to leave some space between the marker for the end of one track and the beginning of the next track... If the markers are actually start/end markers and not simple boundary markers, then it should work (otherwise, you'll simply end up with an extra short track between songs instead of the countdown pause track you were looking for).

Hope this helps.

Steve
http://www.music-and-technology.com