Table of Contents

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The Table of Contents, or ToC, is the section of a CD that describes its index points, subcode flags, and other information used by the player. It is physically located at the start of the disc, before the audio data, and is read by players/optical drives when the disc is first inserted.

The information in the ToC is also replicated in the subcode track that is interspersed with the audio data on the disc. This is the information used during actual playback of the disc for things like the time/position display on the player or activation of de-emphasis processing.

It is possible for the information in the ToC and the information in the subcode track to disagree. Notably, there are a number of releases where the pre-emphasis flag is missing from the ToC but present in the subcode track. This does not affect playback in a standard CD player, but can obscure the need for de-emphasis during DAE as most extraction tools -- including those, like iTunes, that automatically perform de-emphasis on extracted audio -- only check for the PRE flag in the ToC.